July 6-7, 2026 - San Diego, CA, USA

The International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT) is an annual scientific conference, associated with shared tasks on spoken language translation, where both scientific papers and system descriptions are presented.

The 23rd edition of IWSLT will be run as an ACL and ELRA sponsored event, co-located with ACL 2026 in San Diego, CA, USA on July 6-7, 2026. It will be run as a hybrid event.

Shared Tasks

IWSLT 2026 will host the following shared tasks:

Speech to Text Translation

Customized Speech Translation

Speech Generation

Instruction Following

Speech Translation Metrics

All tasks will follow the same schedule (below).
For updates, please join IWSLT Evaluation Campaign google group.

Registration

Please join the IWSLT Evaluation Campaign google group for periodic updates and community questions.

Registration for IWSLT will be handled through the ACL registration page, which will open in 2026. Accepted scientific papers must have one author register their paper to present. The conference will include both in-person and virtual presentation options.

Paper Submission

The IWSLT submission portal will open in early 2026.

IWSLT 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.

We also accept commitments of fully-reviewed papers from ACL Rolling Review (ARR), with a commitment deadline to be announced in early 2026.

Shared task participants also have the opportunity to publish and present their work through a system description paper that will be published in the ACL Proceedings and presented at the conference. Papers should be submitted for review directly through the IWSLT submission portal.

Additionally, to foster cross-pollination of ideas and further community discussion, 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, or other speech, NLP, or MT conferences). Submissions for this category will be accepted through a dedicated form (to be linked here near the ACL notification date). Papers will be checked for relevance to IWSLT, and assigned either oral or poster presentation slots if selected.

Submission requirements

  • All papers may consist of 4 to 8 pages of content with additional pages of references, formatted using the ACL stylesheets.
  • Upon acceptance, all papers will be given one (1) additional content page to address reviewers’ comments.
  • Accepted papers will be published in the ACL Anthology and will be presented at the IWSLT conference either orally or as a poster.
  • Scientific papers must be anonymized for submission, while system description papers do not need to be.
  • We accept submissions which have previously been made available as technical reports or preprints, e.g. on arXiv.
  • We will not accept scientific papers for publication that overlap significantly in content or results with papers published elsewhere (though these may be presented at the conference as described above)
  • Scientific papers which have been, or plan to be, submitted to other venues must be declared as such at the time of submission, and must be withdrawn from the other venues if accepted and published at IWSLT 2026.
  • Scientific papers whose first author is a student will be eligible for the IWSLT 2026 Best Student Paper Award (authors should note eligibility in the paper submission form).
  • Limitations and Ethics Statement sections (see the ACL call for papers for more details) are encouraged but not required. If included, they should be placed after the conclusion for submission and will not count against the page limit.

Important Dates

The preliminary timeline is below and may be subject to minor changes.

Jan 1, 2026 Release of shared task training and dev data
March 15, 2026 Scientific paper submission deadline
Apr 1-15, 2026 Evaluation period
Apr 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

Note: All deadlines are 11:59PM UTC-12:00.

Sponsorship Opportunities

IWSLT welcomes sponsorships!

Organizers

  • Marcello Federico, Amazon, Spain (Conference co-Chair)
  • Alex Waibel, CMU, USA (Conference co-Chair)
  • Antonios Anastasopoulos, George Mason University (Program Chair)
  • Jan Niehues, KIT, Germany (Evaluation Chair)
  • Sebastian Stüker, Zoom, Germany (Sponsorship Chair)
  • Elizabeth Salesky, Google, USA (Publication and Website Chair)
  • Atul Kr. Ojha, University of Galway, Ireland (Publicity Chair)