# Re-translation versus Streaming for Simultaneous Translation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.03643 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.03643/

## Key facts

- Cited by 31 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 7 Apr 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Learning When to Translate for Streaming Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07368/) (2021)
- [How "Real" is Your Real-Time Simultaneous Speech-to-Text Translation System?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18495/) (2024)
- [Streaming Models for Joint Speech Recognition and Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.09149/) (2021)
- [From Simultaneous to Streaming Machine Translation by Leveraging Streaming History](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02459/) (2022)
- [Simultaneous Speech Translation for Live Subtitling: from Delay to Display](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08807/) (2021)
- [Don't Discard Fixed-Window Audio Segmentation in Speech-to-Text Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13363/) (2022)
- [Exploiting Multimodal Reinforcement Learning for Simultaneous Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.11387/) (2021)
- [Continuous Rating as Reliable Human Evaluation of Simultaneous Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02458/) (2022)
- [Simultaneous Translation for Unsegmented Input: A Sliding Window Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09754/) (2022)
- [Token-Level Serialized Output Training for Joint Streaming ASR and ST Leveraging Textual Alignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03354/) (2023)
- [TAPIR: Learning Adaptive Revision for Incremental Natural Language Understanding with a Two-Pass Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10845/) (2023)
- [Monotonic Simultaneous Translation with Chunk-wise Reordering and Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.09646/) (2021)
- [Simulstream: Open-Source Toolkit for Evaluation and Demonstration of Streaming Speech-to-Text Translation Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.17648/) (2025)
- [Simultaneous Neural Machine Translation with Constituent Label Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13480/) (2021)
- [Segmentation-Free Streaming Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14823/) (2023)
- [Long-form Simultaneous Speech Translation: Thesis Proposal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11141/) (2023)
- [Visualization: the missing factor in Simultaneous Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00514/) (2021)
- [Supervised Visual Attention for Simultaneous Multimodal Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09324/) (2022)
- [Robustness of Multi-Source MT to Transcription Errors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16894/) (2023)
- [The Road to Quality is Paved with Good Revisions: A Detailed Evaluation Methodology for Revision Policies in Incremental Sequence Labelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15508/) (2023)
- [Analyzing Scientific Publications using Domain-Specific Word Embedding and Topic Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12940/) (2021)
- [R-BI: Regularized Batched Inputs enhance Incremental Decoding Framework for Low-Latency Simultaneous Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05700/) (2024)
- [When Only Time Will Tell: Interpreting How Transformers Process Local Ambiguities Through the Lens of Restart-Incrementality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13113/) (2024)
- [Data-Driven Adaptive Simultaneous Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12672/) (2022)
- [Rethinking the Reasonability of the Test Set for Simultaneous Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00969/) (2023)
- [Revising with a Backward Glance: Regressions and Skips during Reading as Cognitive Signals for Revision Policies in Incremental Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18229/) (2023)
- [Self-Speculative Biased Decoding for Faster Re-Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21740/) (2025)
- [DPO-Tuned Large Language Models for Segmentation in Simultaneous Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12195/) (2025)
- [Do LLMs Need Architectural Changes for Simultaneous Speech Translation? A Prefix-to-Prefix Data Driven Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.13158/) (2026)
- [Dual-Stream Simultaneous Translation via 2D Grid Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.34902/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

There has been great progress in improving streaming machine translation, a simultaneous paradigm where the system appends to a growing hypothesis as more source content becomes available. We study a related problem in which revisions to the hypothesis beyond strictly appending words are permitted. This is suitable for applications such as live captioning an audio feed. In this setting, we compare custom streaming approaches to re-translation, a straightforward strategy where each new source token triggers a distinct translation from scratch. We find re-translation to be as good or better than state-of-the-art streaming systems, even when operating under constraints that allow very few revisions. We attribute much of this success to a previously proposed data-augmentation technique that adds prefix-pairs to the training data, which alongside wait-k inference forms a strong baseline for streaming translation. We also highlight re-translation's ability to wrap arbitrarily powerful MT systems with an experiment showing large improvements from an upgrade to its base model.