CEF eTranslation: Removing Language Barriers with AI-Powered Technology
©Adobe Stock
Croatia recently kicked-off its Presidency of the EU Council with numerous events including the EU Council Presidency Translator Workshop held at the Press-Centre of the Croatian Presidency at the National and University Library in Zagreb.
The EU Council Presidency Translator is the first customized AI-powered neural machine translation (NMT) solution specifically designed for the Croatian language making this tool highly appreciated by its users. The Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Zagreb played an important role in its development, providing data and quality assurance services that helped language technology company Tilde create the first high-grade NMT solution for Croatian.
During translation, NMT systems examine the entire context of the sentence, producing highly readable translations that are almost human-like in style. The quality evaluation tests of the EU Presidency Translator assured its top-notch quality and demonstrated better translations than Google Translate in the Croatian-English and English-Croatian language pairs. The Presidency Translator is a multilingual communication tool that enables delegates, journalists, translators, and visitors to overcome language barriers and access information during Croatia's Presidency of the EU Council. This tool allows users to automatically translate texts, entire documents, and local websites with the European Commission’s Connecting Europe Facility (CEF)-financed eTranslation Building Block, which includes which includes secure machine translation (MT) systems for all official EU languages.
Marko Tadić, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb: “During this project, Croatia received valuable know-how that will help to develop similar tools in the future. In 2013, the Croatian language became one of the 24 official EU languages. In addition, there are more than 60 indigenous regional or minority languages, as well as many non-indigenous languages spoken by migrant communities. These numbers clearly demonstrate the importance of machine translation not only for translation of official EU and legal documents, but also for the creation of the Single European Digital Market.”
According to a Eurobarometer study, nearly 42% of Europeans do not purchase goods or services online if information about them is not provided in their native language. This poses a challenge not only to public administrations as multilingual information needs to be provided to its residents, but also to companies that have to offer information in customers’ native languages. Thanks to advances in AI and machine learning, Neural Machine Translation (NMT) has made it possible to overcome language barriers and provide secure and instant access to multilingual information. High quality machine translation is especially important for smaller languages to ensure their continued existence in the digital age.
Artūrs Vasiļevskis, Head of Machine Translation Solutions at Tilde: “We focused both on the quality and usability of machine translation to make it most suitable for the needs of the EU Council Presidency. Translation between Croatian and English was carefully tailored to the terminological and stylistic requirements of the Presidency. Secure data processing, instant translation of documents and websites preserving their formatting, tools to support human translators – these are just a few features that facilitate the daily work of Presidency staff and visitors. This solution demonstrates how machine translation can be customized to provide notable efficiency and quality in cross-lingual communication.”
About Tilde
Tilde is a leading European language technology innovator and service provider that strives to seal the gap created by language barriers and to enable language diversity in the digital age. By relying on the latest cutting-edge AI-driven technology, Tilde develops custom machine translation systems, online terminology services, intelligent virtual assistants, speech technologies, and proofing tools.
About CEF eTranslation
CEF eTranslation helps the European and national public administrations exchange information in the EU without any language barriers by offering machine translation capacities that allow all Digital Service Infrastructures (DSIs) become multilingual. This project is partly funded by a CEF Telecom grant "Translation Automation Services for EU Council Presidency (2018-EU-IA-0079)". This funding from the CEF Telecom program administered by the Innovation and Networks Executive Agency (INEA) is made available annually for the uptake of eTranslation in Europe, as well as to support the provision of language resources to CEF eTranslation. Eligible parties can apply for funding by submitting a proposal during the annual application period.