Lost in translation: machine translation and text-to-speech in industry 4.0

Small lot sizes are becoming more common in modern manufacturing. Rather than automate every possible product variant, companies may rely on manual assembly to be more flexible. However, it can be difficult for people to remember the steps for every possible product variant. Assistive systems providing instructions can support workers. In this paper, we present a study investigating whether existing machine translation and text-to-speech engines provide sufficient quality to enable on-the-fly translations to provide assistance to workers in their native languages. The results of our tests indicate that machine translation is not yet sufficient for this application.