Machine Translation Service

MT@EC

When is this action of interest to you?

You receive a question or a request in an official EU language you do not understand. You would like to see whether it is relevant for you and decide to whom you could forward it for further action. The new European Commission machine translation service will allow you to quickly check the gist of incoming information and limit the use of human translation to communication activities requiring high quality translation.

What is this action about?

Documents used by the European Commission, other European Institutions and public administrations in the multilingual environment of the European Union need to be available in different national languages. The sheer volume of content makes this an impossible task to achieve using human translators alone.

The European Commission has already been providing a machine translation service for a number of years, based on "rule-based" Machine Translation technology. The service delivered a certain level of automated "raw machine translation" quality for a small number of language pairs.

In the past few years, machine translation technology has shifted towards Statistical Machine Translation (SMT), which opens new opportunities, given its quality, time-to-market and development costs.

With MT@EC, the Commission is developing a new system based on SMT that will provide an improved machine translation service in terms both of quality of output and number of supported languages. A service run by the Commission will guarantee continuity and quality of service, as well as respect of confidentiality and other legal aspects related to trust in information exchange.

What are the objectives?

• development and operation of a common Statistical Machine Translation service, the MT@EC, offered by the European Commission and used by European and national public administrations;
• option to customise the service for specific administration needs.

What are the benefits?

What is our approach?

The European Commission’s Directorate-General for Translation (DG Translation) established an action plan to develop a new machine translation service in June 2010 focused on three areas: data, engines, and service.

The data/language resources required for the MT@EC service will be collected and managed by DG Translation. The ISA programme will contribute to "IT and organisation", i.e. putting in place the appropriate IT infrastructure, and developing the IT and organisational environment for developing and operating the basic generic (so-called "baseline") MT@EC service.

The ISA action will cover the following elements:

• the infrastructure for training and running the system;
• the engineering of the MT@EC baseline MT engines;
• the engineering of the system for dispatching requests for MT and output;
• the helpdesk operations;
• the reception, technical analysis and implementation of requests for "custom engines";
• contacts with European and national administrations, users of the system.

Project stages:

• During the inception phase (2010-2012) the key users of the service and their requirements are identified and the scope and boundary conditions for MT@EC are established. After examining architectural options and elaborating proofs-of-concept an executable architectural prototype is implemented;
• The Execution phase (2012-2013) focuses on developing and deploying the first production release of MT@EC and on integrating it with related Commission IT systems and processes;
• During the Pilot operation phase (2013-2014) the focus is on elaborating and testing methods and structures for better serving the needs of different types of customers - including Member States public administrations - under different conditions of use;