  Direct speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) with discrete units leverages
recent progress in speech representation learning. Specifically, a sequence of
discrete representations derived in a self-supervised manner are predicted from
the model and passed to a vocoder for speech reconstruction, while still facing
the following challenges: 1) Acoustic multimodality: the discrete units derived
from speech with same content could be indeterministic due to the acoustic
property (e.g., rhythm, pitch, and energy), which causes deterioration of
translation accuracy; 2) high latency: current S2ST systems utilize
autoregressive models which predict each unit conditioned on the sequence
previously generated, failing to take full advantage of parallelism. In this
work, we propose TranSpeech, a speech-to-speech translation model with
bilateral perturbation. To alleviate the acoustic multimodal problem, we
propose bilateral perturbation (BiP), which consists of the style normalization
and information enhancement stages, to learn only the linguistic information
from speech samples and generate more deterministic representations. With
reduced multimodality, we step forward and become the first to establish a
non-autoregressive S2ST technique, which repeatedly masks and predicts unit
choices and produces high-accuracy results in just a few cycles. Experimental
results on three language pairs demonstrate that BiP yields an improvement of
2.9 BLEU on average compared with a baseline textless S2ST model. Moreover, our
parallel decoding shows a significant reduction of inference latency, enabling
speedup up to 21.4x than autoregressive technique. Audio samples are available
at \url{https://TranSpeech.github.io/}

Computation and Language;Sound;Audio and Speech Processing