Breaking down language barriers with the translation tool of the German EU Council Presidency

Breaking down language barriers with the translation tool of the German EU Council Presidency

Berlin, 8.6.2020

Multilingualism and linguistic diversity are an essential part of European identity. However, the EU’s 24 official languages can also create language barriers that prevent seamless communication between individuals, businesses and public institutions across borders and languages. During the EU Presidency in particular, a huge amount of text has to be translated into different languages. The EU Council Presidency Translator offers a fast, simple and secure method to overcome the cross-lingual challenges associated with the German EU Council Presidency. For example, the websites of the German Council Presidency can be translated into all official languages. The data is transmitted securely within the framework of the DSGVO and processed on servers within the EU. Neither the providers nor third parties have access to the data.

The Presidency Translator is freely accessible to everyone. It also demonstrates the current performance of German and European translation technology for all 24 official languages of the EU. Without doubt, machine translation (MT) is one of the technologies that has experienced a rapid upswing in recent years thanks to the learning processes of artificial intelligence. Despite often convincing translation results in individual language directions, many applications of MT still require editorial revision. At the same time, there are many types of text that cannot be easily translated by machine, so that a symbiosis of human and machine translation is ideal.

The creation and maintenance of the tool is made possible by a grant from the German Foreign Office to the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) and Tilde. The MÜ platform was developed for previous presidencies of Tilde with funding from the European Union and adapted for the German presidency. The translation systems in it are from DFKI, DeepL, Tilde and eTranslation.

DeepL GmbH is an AI company based in Germany that specializes in the development of neural network technology for languages. With the launch of DeepL Translator in August 2017, DeepL raised the bar for what can be achieved in terms of machine translation quality and quickly earned worldwide praise. DeepL succeeded in taking a leading role in global competition.

DFKI GmbH is Germany’s leading business-oriented research institution in the field of innovative software technologies based on artificial intelligence methods. Based on application-oriented basic research, product functions, prototypes and patentable solutions in the field of information and communication technology are developed in twenty research areas, eight competence centers and eight living labs. Machine translation is a central research topic in language technology.

eTranslation is the European Commission’s machine translation system covering all official languages. eTranslation is currently connected to over 50 services such as the European Open Data Portal and publicly accessible legal databases such as EUR-Lex and N-Lex and is used throughout the EU to automatically pre-translate more than 3 million pages per year. The basis for the continuous development of this MT system is the work of a large number of language experts who post-edit the machine-generated texts and constantly maintain and expand the terminology databases used by MT systems.

Tilde, based in Latvia, is a leading European language technology innovator and service provider, playing an important role in Europe-wide efforts to overcome language barriers and enable multilingualism in the fast-moving digital age. Tilde has already supported six presidencies in the European Union.

Together, the systems allow for text extraction from all 24 official EU languages. In some of the systems, translators from German ministries have provided authority specific texts and data and participated in tests to improve the reliability of the MT systems. For the first time, the Presidency Translator integrates German and European high-tech AI or expert knowledge from industry (DeepL, Tilde) and publicly funded institutions (eTranslate, German ministries) in close cooperation.

The EU Council Presidency Translator will remain freely accessible for the entire duration of the German EU Council Presidency. Further information can be found on the website. You are welcome to try it out!

Contact: info@presidencymt.eu