CEF eTranslation Launch

European Commission, 2017

The official launch of eTranslation, the new Commission machine translation service, took place in the Berlaymont on 15 November, with the participation of DGT Director-General Rytis Martikonis and DG CNECT Director-General Roberto Viola and DG DIGIT Director Philippe Van Damme.

eTranslation is the upgraded version of MT@EC, the Commission's  machine translation service which officially launched in 2013. It is used extensively within the EU Institutions, by a considerable number of European and national officials, as well as by online services funded or supported by the EU. It is the machine translation service of the CEF eTranslation building block. It enables multilingual functioning of other CEF Digital 2018 Service Infrastructures (DSI), with the goal of making European public services available in any of the official EU languages.

The new service includes faster translation engines covering all EU languages and produces more fluent translations for English into and out of German and Hungarian, as well as English to Estonian and Finnish through the use of the Commission’s first, state-of-the-art neural translation engines. New language combinations will be added once a month throughout 2018 and the next step will be to offer engines tailored to specific subject areas by building domain-specific engines, using data collected throughout Europe by the European Language Resource Consortium (www.lr-coordination.eu).

 Practical demonstrations

Officials from national public administrations already registered to use the European Commission machine translation service can try out eTranslation here: https://webgate.ec.europa.eu/etranslation/.

The eTranslation service can also be integrated into public online services via an API. This documentation - and information for general queries from other interested users - can be obtained on request from CEF-AT@ec.europa.eu.