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The International Conference on Spoken Language Translation
ACL – 23rd IWSLT 2026 – First Call for Participation
July 6-7, 2026 - San Diego, CA, USA
The International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT) is the premier annual conference for all aspects of Spoken Language Translation. Every year, the conference organises and sponsors open evaluation campaigns around key challenges in simultaneous and consecutive translation, under real-time/low-latency or offline conditions and under low-resource or multilingual constraints. System descriptions and results from participants’ systems and scientific papers related to key algorithmic advances and best practices are presented.
IWSLT is the venue of the SIGSLTs, the Special Interest Group on Spoken Language Translation of ACL, ISCA and ELRA. With a track record of 22 years, IWSLT benchmarks and proceedings serve as reference for all researchers and practitioners working on speech translation and related fields.
The 23rd edition of IWSLT will be run as an ELRA/ACL event and co-located with ACL 2026 on July 6-7, 2026. It will be run as a hybrid event.
Important Dates
January 1, 2026: Release of shared task training and dev data
March 15, 2026: Scientific paper submission deadline
Apr 1-15, 2026: Evaluation period
April 21, 2026: System description paper submission deadline
May 15, 2026: Notification of acceptance
June 1, 2026: Camera-ready deadline (all papers)
July 6-7, 2026: IWSLT conference
Evaluation
The IWSLT 2026 features shared tasks that address the following focus areas:
Speech to Text Translation track: Offline, Low-resource
Customized Speech Translation track: Compression, Subtitling, Simultaneous
Speech Generation track: Indic S2S, African S2S, Cross-lingual Voice Cloning
Instruction Following track
Speech Translation Metrics track
Training and development data for each shared task will be prepared and released by the respective organisers (for further information on this initiative, please refer to the website). Participants will receive instructions about how to submit their runs. In addition, participants have the opportunity to present their work through a system paper that will be published in the ACL Proceedings.
Conference
IWSLT also invites submissions of scientific papers to be published in the ACL Proceedings and presented either in oral or poster format. The conference selects high-quality, original contributions on theoretical and practical issues of spoken language translation research, technologies and applications. Submissions will be accepted directly through the IWSLT submission site (to be announced at the conference website). We will also accept commitments of submissions with reviews from the ACL Rolling Review.
Additionally, to foster cross-pollination of ideas, the conference also invites the presentation of papers on speech translation recently published elsewhere. Please note that this is for non-archival presentation of papers relevant to speech translation already published in other venues (e.g., ACL 2026 Findings papers, speech, NLP or MT conferences). Submissions for this category will be accepted through a dedicated form (to be announced at the conference website). Papers will be checked for relevance to IWSLT and assigned either oral or poster presentation slots if selected.
Contact
Please send an email to iwslt-evaluation-campaign@googlegroups.com if you have any questions related to the shared tasks.Marcello, Alex, Antonios, Jan, Sebastian, Elizabeth, Atul
(IWSLT organisers)