The document outlines the European Union's vision to eliminate language barriers by 2025, aiming for high-quality automated translation across at least 90% of official EU languages. It emphasizes the need for improved machine translation resources, tools, and collaborative efforts among member states to establish accessible language technology infrastructure. Additionally, it highlights the role of the Connecting Europe Facility in supporting these initiatives through funding and development of multilingual digital services.

1. Towards European Infrastructure for
Automated Translation
Andrejs Vasiļjevs
CEO
1
TAUS Industry Leaders Forum, Berlin, June 1, 2015

2. Language Technologies for
Multilingual Digital Single Market
24 official languages of EU create
barriers that prevent all European
consumers from fully engaging in
online activities and restricts access
to digital assets.

3. European Union Vision:
Cracking the language barrier
By 2025, an online EU internal market
free of language barriers
– delivering automatic translation quality, equal to currently
best performing language pair/direction
– in most relevant use situations
– for at least 90% of the EU official languages


4. European Union Vision:
Cracking the language barrier
Significant improvement in quality,
coverage and technical maturity of MT for
at least half of the 21 EU languages
that currently have "weak or no support" or
"fragmentary support" of MT solutions, according
to the META-NET Language White Papers


5. European Union Vision:
Cracking the language barrier
Large contributions of language resources and
language technology tools from all EU
Member States and Associated countries to:
– a single platform for sharing, maintaining and making use
of language resources and tools;
– establishing widely agreed benchmarks for machine
translation quality,
– stimulating competition between methods and systems


6. CEF – Connecting Europe
Facility
• A funding programme for infrastructures and deployment of
digital services:
– CEF Transport
– CEF Energy
– CEF Telecommunication
• Broadband
• Digital Services
• Deploys mature technologies to build, enable and operate
pan-European Digital Services (and roads and energy grids)
• Automated translation building block: machine translation
engines and specialised language resources including the
necessary tools and programming interfaces needed to
operate the pan-European digital services in a multilingual
environment.
6/8/20156

7. Automated Translation
• Automated Translation is a "building block" which will
serve the other Digital Services Infrastructures in CEF
• Automated Translation should provide whatever is
needed to make DSIs actually multilingual
• Adaptable machine translation and relevant Language
Resources are central
• Other likely key areas: CAT, CMS, terminology, semantic
interoperability, interfaces to various systems and data
types
• Human element is essential: service provision, quality
control, validation, post-editing, on-demand response...

9. Deliver the strategic vision, functional, technical and
operational specifications of the infrastructure for EU
public service for automated translation and other
multilingual services and resources
MLi Project

10. CEF.AT Current tasks
MT@EC system provides initial Automated Translation
services:
• extending its language coverage and functionalities to
allow provision of small-scale implementations of
customised automated translation services to
three mature or operational CEF DSIs;
• providing input to the requirements analysis and
architecture specification tasks, especially deriving
information from the small-scale implementations

11. CEF.AT European Language
Resource Coordination
Setting up a coordination mechanism and governance
structure that:
• Allows language resources from various sources to be
made accessible and interoperable.
• Includes liaising with relevant Member State
administrations in view of transferring linguistic assets
and knowledge to improve the coverage and quality of
the Automated Translation service.
• Improves the situation of those EU languages that
currently have poor coverage in terms of automated
translation solutions.
11

12. HUGO.LV
LATVIA
TRANSLATES WITH
• Machine translation service for the Latvian public
sector
• Securely translates texts, documents, websites
• Adapted for the Latvian language and public sector
texts
• Integrated into e-services and government websites
• Languages
• Latvian-English
• English-Latvian
• Latvian-Russian Developed by

14. Towards EU Multilingual
Infrastructure
• The role of European Commission - developer and
operator or procurement body to ensure the service?
• How to fulfill immense complexity and diversity of the
needs?
– Real time translation for all 24 EU languages
– Multitude of user groups
– Diversity of domains
– Variety of quality requirements
– Variety of genres, styles, formats, applications
– etc.
• How to get use of the Europe’s best technologies,
research and entrepreneurial talent?
?

15. Thank you!
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@MLiProject
facebook.com/mliproject
andrejs@tilde.com