Speech-to-speech generation system and method

A speech-to-speech generation method, comprising the steps of:

• recognizing the speech of language A and creating the corresponding text of language A;
• translating the text from language A to language B;
• generating the speech of language B according to the text of language B,
• said speech-to-speech method is characterized by further comprising the steps of:
• extracting expressive parameters from the speech of language A, said expressive parameters comprising pitch, volume and duration at a word level and intonation and sentence envelope at a sentence level;
• obtaining normalized expressive parameters for language A based on a degree of variation of pitch, volume and duration at a word level and intonation and sentence envelope at a sentence level for words in a sentence and deriving relative expressive parameters from the normalized parameters;
• comparing relative parameters of expressive speech with those of reference speech to identify varying relative parameters to be provided to said expressive parameter mapping means;
• and
• mapping the identified varying relative parameters extracted by the detecting steps from language A to language B to obtain adjustment parameters for language B, and driving the text-to-speech generation process using the adjustment parameters mapping results to synthesized expressive speech in language B.