2020 CEF funding for multilingual online services - including SMEs
The Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) is making up to €4 million of grant funding available for multilingual, digital projects that want to use or contribute to the CEF eTranslation Building Block!
Multilingualism is both a powerful symbol of the EU’s unity in diversity, and one of the most complex challenges facing the full integration of the digital single market. The European Commission is committed to promoting the equality of all languages and protecting linguistic diversity, while making the EU more integrated and connected than ever. Secure and accurate machine translation is key to this process, and the eTranslation Building Block is making this possible in a way previously unimaginable.
This call for proposals welcomes submissions from projects involving at least two different languages spoken in EU Member States, Icelandic and/or Norwegian. These grants are intended for projects with just one of the following objectives (see the Call Text on INEA’s website for full details and eligibility criteria):
- Contributing language resources to CEF’s Automated Translation tool through the European Language Resource Coordination repository (ELRC-SHARE)
- Making existing, language-specific tools with multilingual capabilities freely and openly available through ELRC-SHARE
- Integrating CEF’s Automated Translation tool into existing online public services, public administrations or SMEs
The more linguistic resources eTranslation has at its disposal, the better it translates. This will improve the quality of the machine translation offered by the eTranslation Building Block, particularly in under-resourced languages and domains of public interest (e.g. scientific research, health, tax, cultural heritage).
This funding also aims to empower both public entities and SMEs to integrate CEF’s machine translation tool into existing online services: as of this March, eTranslation has been made available, free of charge, to any European SME. These grants will help SMEs with multilingual, cross-border business activities to integrate eTranslation’s state-of-the-art, neural machine translation capabilities into their workflow.
The eTranslation Building Block is already lowering linguistic barriers all over Europe, realising the vision of the multilingual Digital Single Market. With the collaboration of CEF-funded multilingual projects, this machine translation tool will become not only more effective but also more widespread. Together we are fostering the emergence of pan-European, interoperable public services.
Interested in funding for your multilingual, cross-border digital project? Visit INEA to find out more. Funding deadline for submissions is 25 June 2020.