CEF eTranslation really is one in a million
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On 10 October 2019, the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) eTranslation Building Block delivered over a million translated pages in a single day!
CEF eTranslation delivered 1 059 855 pages ensuring that all EU citizens can access and use Commission services in the 24 official EU languages. These include the Joint Research Council, the European Commission's science and knowledge service, the European data portal, which harvests the metadata of public sector information available on public data portals in EU Member States and the Better Regulation Portal, where citizens can contribute to EU policy, law-making and other initiatives as they take shape.
CEF eTranslation is a machine translation tool, which draws upon decades worth of work by EU translators (over 1 billion sentences in the official languages of the Union) and is designed to retain the format of structured documents during translation. It can translate multiple documents to multiple languages at once and guarantees continuous service of high quality, with due consideration for the confidentiality and security of data during the translation process.
CEF eTranslation is built using cutting-edge neural network technology. This AI-based machine learning approach examines the full context of a sentence to produce highly fluent, readable, and almost human-like translations.
Through CEF eTranslation, citizens and businesses can benefit from a wider range of digital public services in Europe, regardless of their language ability.
The eTranslation Building Block can be used in two ways:
- Any public administration in the European Union, Iceland or Norway can integrate eTranslation into digital services, making them multilingual;
- If you are a civil servant working in a public administration from EU, Iceland or Norway, you are entitled to use the eTranslation website to request automatic translations.
eTranslation is continuously improved through the European Language Resource Coordination (ELRC) effort, which identifies and gathers language and translation data relevant to national public services, administrations and governmental institutions across all 30 European countries participating in the CEF programme.
In addition, the more translations fed into the system, the better the translations get.
To build a Digital Single Market, the CEF programme funds key digital infrastructure, known as Building Blocks. The CEF Building Blocks offer basic capabilities that can be reused in any European project to facilitate the delivery of digital public services across borders and sectors. Currently, there are eight building blocks: Big Data Test Infrastructure, Context Broker, Archiving, eDelivery, eID, eInvoicing, eSignature and eTranslation. Blockchain and the Once Only Principle are on their way to becoming operational Building Blocks in the near future.