CEF eTranslation: Fifteen additional neural engines included
European Commission 2018
The European Commission is happy to announce the release of the last fifteen neural engines covering the following languages:
- English into Greek, Spanish, Italian, Maltese, Portuguese and Romanian
- Danish, Dutch and Slovenian into English
CEF eTranslation now offers artificial intelligence-based machine translation in all 24 official EU languages.
Funded by the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF), the EU’s main instrument supporting trans-European infrastructures, the eTranslation Building Block helps European and national public administrations exchange information across language barriers.
The EU now has more than 500 million citizens, 28 Member States, 24 official languages and 3 alphabets. The harmonious co-existence of many languages in Europe is a powerful symbol of the EU's aspiration to be united in diversity - a cornerstone of the European project. A Digital Single Market can only be built with effective multilingual digital services.
eTranslation is the European Commission’s machine translation service, developed by its Directorate-General for Translation. It can translate documents between all official EU languages. The format and formatting of the original document is preserved, except for PDF files, which are returned as docx. eTranslation builds on the European Commission’s earlier machine translation service, MT@EC. The MT@EC service, recently retired from service, was based on MOSES open-source translation toolkit, a Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) system developed with co-funding from EU research and innovation programmes, while eTranslation is following the field’s move into neural machine translation.
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.
Alongside the eTranslation tool, the CEF eTranslation Building Block also includes the European Language Resource Coordination (ELRC). To improve upon the quality and coverage of the service, CEF eTranslation requires a much larger scope of language resources and translation data. The European Commission therefore launched ELRC to identify and gather language and translation data relevant to national public services, administrations and governmental institutions across all 30 European countries participating in the CEF programme.
Up to €5 million in grant funding is currently available from the CEF Telecom programme, administered by the Innovation and Networks Executive Agency (INEA), supporting the uptake of CEF eTranslation in Europe. It also supports the provision of language resources for CEF eTranslation. The deadline for applications is 18 September 2018.