For endangered languages, data collection campaigns have to accommodate the challenge that many of them are from oral tradition, and producing transcriptions is costly. Therefore, it is fundamental to translate them into a widely spoken language to ensure interpretability of the recordings. In this paper we investigate how the choice of translation language affects the posterior documentation work and potential automatic approaches which will work on top of the produced bilingual corpus. For answering this question, we use the MaSS multilingual speech corpus (Boito et al., 2020) for creating 56 bilingual pairs that we apply to the task of low-resource unsupervised word segmentation and alignment. Our results highlight that the choice of language for translation influences the word segmentation performance, and that different lexicons are learned by using different aligned translations. Lastly, this paper proposes a hybrid approach for bilingual word segmentation, combining boundary clues extracted from a non-parametric Bayesian model (Goldwater et al., 2009a) with the attentional word segmentation neural model from Godard et al. (2018). Our results suggest that incorporating these clues into the neural models’ input representation increases their translation and alignment quality, specially for challenging language pairs.

The CMU Wilderness Multilingual Speech Dataset (Black, 2019) is a newly published multilingual speech dataset based on recorded readings of the New Testament. It provides data to build Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Text-to-Speech (TTS) models for potentially 700 languages. However, the fact that the source content (the Bible) is the same for all the languages is not exploited to date.Therefore, this article proposes to add multilingual links between speech segments in different languages, and shares a large and clean dataset of 8,130 parallel spoken utterances across 8 languages (56 language pairs). We name this corpus MaSS (Multilingual corpus of Sentence-aligned Spoken utterances). The covered languages (Basque, English, Finnish, French, Hungarian, Romanian, Russian and Spanish) allow researches on speech-to-speech alignment as well as on translation for typologically different language pairs. The quality of the final corpus is attested by human evaluation performed on a corpus subset (100 utterances, 8 language pairs). Lastly, we showcase the usefulness of the final product on a bilingual speech retrieval task.