Austrian EU Council Presidency Website Integrates CEF eTranslation
European Commission, 2018
The Austrian EU Council Presidency has integrated the EU Council Presidency Translator into its official website via the EU Council Presidency Translator. This follows similar initiatives by the Estonian and Bulgarian presidencies.
The EU Council Presidency Translator is a multilingual communication tool that enables delegates, journalists, translators, and visitors to cross language barriers and access information during the Presidency of the Council of the EU in 2017-2018.
The tool enables users to automatically translate texts, full documents, and local websites with the European Commission’s CEF eTranslation building block, which includes secure machine translation (MT) systems for all official EU languages.
The EU Council Presidency Translator combines the CEF eTranslation with custom Neural Machine Translation (NMT) engines developed by Tilde, in cooperation with the Centre for Translation Studies at the University of Vienna. This AI-based machine learning approach examines the full context of a sentence to produce highly fluent, readable, and uncannily human-like translations.
“The EU Council Presidency Translators significantly contributes to the successful implementation of the Austrian EU Council Presidency. It facilitates multilingual communication in a period when the priorities of the EU agenda are set”, Achim Braun, representative of the European Commission in Austria.
“Powered by CEF eTranslation and Artificial Intelligence, the EU Council Presidency Translator, developed by Tilde and its partners, is a great example of cutting-edge technological innovation being applied to the communication strategy at large-scale international events to foster greater understanding across language barriers and cultures alike”, Tilde’s CEO Andrejs Vasiljevs.
The Council of the European Union represents the governments of the EU Member States. Among other duties, the Council negotiates and adopts legislative acts in most cases together with the European Parliament and coordinates Member States' policies in specific fields. The presidency of the Council rotates among the EU member states every 6 months. During this 6-month period, the presidency chairs meetings at every level in the Council, helping to ensure the continuity of the EU's work in the Council.
eTranslation is a Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) building block. Its main goal is to help European and national public administrations exchange information across language barriers in the EU, by providing machine translation capabilities that will enable trans-European digital infrastructure to be multilingual. Public administrations, citizens and businesses in the EU are thus be able to use digital services in the language they choose.
CEF grant funding supports the extension and use of CEF eTranslation by the presidency. €5 million of CEF grant funding is currently available to support the adoption of CEF eTranslation. The call for proposals for grant funding is organised by the Innovation & Networks Executive Agency (INEA). The deadline for submission is 18 September 2018.
CEF offers a service package including software, services, documentation and tools helping you to test, deploy and operate the building block. The eTranslation service provides the ability to translate formatted documents and plain text between any pair of EU official languages, as well as Norwegian (Bokmål) and Icelandic, while preserving to the greatest extent possible the structure and format of those documents.