This talk provides an overview of the technology, development, and human aspects of cross-lingual machine mediated communication. The world today is emerging as a truly global society. One of the foremost challenges in such a society is the ability to communicate freely and effectively across linguistic and cultural barriers.

The importance of overcoming these barriers is especially high in critical application environments such as providing health care, and conducting relief and peacekeeping missions. For instance, in the public health domain, a number of studies have demonstrated that good quality human translation and interpretation can improve healthcare access and delivery; this also includes helping people understand their contractual obligations, and, above all, the informed consent. In-fact, Federal and State Laws mandate that healthcare providers and hospitals provide language access.

Unfortunately, human resources for in-person or phone-based interpretation are typically not easily available, tend to be financially prohibitive or raise privacy issues. Advances in automatic multilingual speech recognition, translation and synthesis technologies promise the creation of transformative, possibilities for cost-effective, widely deployable and always available solutions for enabling and enhancing improved communication between people who do not share a common language. The first Speech-to-Speech (S2S) systems to enable such communication are already well under development.

In this talk I will briefly talk about the design of a S2S system, its component technologies, their limitations, and highlights of research towards overcoming these limitations. I will touch on a variety of relevant aspects including linguistic efforts and human factors work needed in the design of the system.