  Language barriers present a great challenge in our increasingly connected and
global world. Especially within the medical domain, e.g. hospital or emergency
room, communication difficulties and delays may lead to malpractice and
non-optimal patient care. In the HYKIST project, we consider patient-physician
communication, more specifically between a German-speaking physician and an
Arabic- or Vietnamese-speaking patient. Currently, a doctor can call the
Triaphon service to get assistance from an interpreter in order to help
facilitate communication. The HYKIST goal is to support the usually
non-professional bilingual interpreter with an automatic speech translation
system to improve patient care and help overcome language barriers. In this
work, we present our ASR system development efforts for this conversational
telephone speech translation task in the medical domain for two languages
pairs, data collection, various acoustic model architectures and
dialect-induced difficulties.
