The Verbmobil System currently under development in Germany would input speech in a source language dialogue, translate it, and output synthesized speech in a target language, all in real time under the conditions of face-to-face dialogue. This preliminary study is an assessment of the state of the art of the speech recognition and machine translation fields, and a frank discussion of the challenges the developers of such a system face. A speech-based machine translation system in effect combines all the technical problems of understanding and generation systems and adds the very special...