  Chinese dialects are different variations of Chinese and can be considered as
different languages in the same language family with Mandarin. Though they all
use Chinese characters, the pronunciations, grammar and idioms can vary
significantly, and even local speakers may find it hard to input correct
written forms of dialect. Besides, using Mandarin text as text-to-speech inputs
would generate speech with poor naturalness. In this paper, we propose a novel
Chinese dialect TTS frontend with a translation module, which converts Mandarin
text into dialectic expressions to improve the intelligibility and naturalness
of synthesized speech. A non-autoregressive neural machine translation model
with various tricks is proposed for the translation task. It is the first known
work to incorporate translation with TTS frontend. Experiments on Cantonese
show the proposed model improves 2.56 BLEU and TTS improves 0.27 MOS with
Mandarin inputs.
