Over the past six months, the Presidency Translator has been used in a variety of ways, helping its users to translate websites (including the official website of Germany’s Presidency of the Council of the European Union, http://eu2020.de), plain text and documents. In addition, with the help of CAT-Tool (computer-assisted translation) plug-ins, the language services of German ministries were supported in coping with the high volume of required translations into all 24 EU languages.
The majority of the website translations stem from the website of Germany’s Presidency of the Council of the EU, which can be translated into any of the 24 official EU languages with one simple click. Translations into French and English are provided by professional translators, while the remaining 22 languages are covered by the German EU Council Presidency Translator. The five most frequently used languages for website translation are Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Bulgarian and Polish.
Besides adding a strong value to the German Presidency operations during the worldwide COVID-19 crisis, the EU Council Presidency Translator has also been helping the general public to overcome language challenges. With users of 139 countries, the machine translation system has been used all across the world. The EU Council Presidency Translator impressed with its successful collaboration of the experience and expertise from leading companies from research (DFKI), industry (DeepL, Tilde) as well as from the public sector (through eTranslation, the machine translation system provided by the European Commission). The integration platform was developed by Tilde and is operating with translation systems from DeepL, DFKI, eTranslation and Tilde. Among others, it includes special systems which have been developed and evaluated in close cooperation with translators from the language services of German ministries. The project of the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) and the language technology and localisation company Tilde was supported by a grant from the Federal Foreign Office.
With the Presidency Translator, a milestone for European language technology and "AI made in Europe" could be set on the way to make it easier for people to communicate across language barriers.