Burushaski-English Speech Translation Corpus

The Burushaski Speech–English Parallel Corpus is a community-driven language resource developed to support research in speech translation, machine translation, automatic speech recognition, and other language technologies for Burushaski, an under-resourced language isolate spoken in northern Pakistan. The dataset was collected using an audio-first, linguistically informed framework that combines structured elicitation targeting high-frequency vocabulary and key grammatical phenomena with the collection of functional and conversational language relevant to real-world communication. Data collection was facilitated through a custom mobile application that standardized prompts while enabling scalable community participation, and the development process incorporated continuous feedback from Burushaski-speaking contributors to improve linguistic coverage and cultural relevance. The current pilot release contains 14,970 recorded utterances from native speakers, with each audio recording paired with an English translation, creating a parallel corpus intended to advance research, promote language inclusion in AI, and expand the digital presence of Burushaski.