CEF eTranslation Used During Estonian EU Council Presidency
European Commisison, 2017
At the Tallinn Digital Summit on 29 September 2017, twenty-five heads of state and government met together to discuss e-governance, cybersecurity, digital economy, and the labour market.
At the Tallinn Digital Summit Expo, the AI-powered EU Council Presidency Translator was presented to delegates, journalists, and public sector staff members to enable multilingual communication.
To reach the goal of an EU Council Presidency without language barriers, the translation tool uses Neural Machine Translation and CEF eTranslation to provide secure, instant translation of texts, full documents, and websites.
The EU Council Presidency translation tool was developed by Tilde, a leading European language technology company based in Riga, Tallinn, and Vilnius, with support from the CEF eTranslation building block. In addition to building AI technology, Tilde helps the EU to craft multilingual policy by providing input on the current state of language technology innovation.
Currently working in Estonian to English (and vice-versa), the EU Council Presidency Translator will be further elaborated for the Bulgarian and Austrian presidencies via the CEF eTranslation building block. The tool will benefit from analysis of its usage at the Estonian presidency and receive regular improvements.
CEF eTranslation helps European and national public administrations exchange information across language barriers in the EU, by providing machine translation capabilities that will enable all Digital Service Infrastructures (DSIs) to be multilingual. CEF eTranslation builds on the existing machine translation service of the European Commission, MT@EC, developed by the Directorate-General for Translation (DGT). MT@EC translation engines are trained using the vast Euramis translation memories, comprising over 1 billion sentences in the 24 official EU languages, produced by the translators of the EU institutions over the past decades.
Grant funding from the CEF Telecom programme, administered by the Innovation and Networks Executive Agency (INEA), is made available annually to the uptake of eTranslation in Europe and support the provision of language resources for CEF eTranslaton. Eligible parties can apply for funding by submitting a proposal during the relevant period each year.
The Tallinn Digital Summit brought together EU heads of state and government in the capital of Estonia to discuss the steps needed to enable people, enterprises and governments to fully tap into the potential of innovative technologies and digitalisation. The the Tallinn Ministerial Declaration on eGovernment, signed on 6 October 2017, called for the reuse and long-term sustainability of the CEF building blocks.