Government Technology

European Commission Makes Computer-Assisted Translation More Accessible


You May Also Like

January 18, 2008 By

The European Commission has made freely available its collection of about 1 million sentences, and their high quality translations, in 22 of the 23 official EU languages -- including those of the new member states. This is the biggest collection ever of so many languages.

This kind of data is highly sought after by developers of machine translation systems in which automatic translation software "learns" from manually translated texts how words and phrases are correctly and contextually translated. The data can also help the development of other linguistic software tools such as grammar and spell checkers, online dictionaries and multilingual text classification systems.

The European Union institutions have more multilingual texts than any other organization because of the requirements that EU law exist in each of its 23 official languages. Their translation services work with 253 possible language pair combinations and produce around 1.5 million translated pages a year.

Whereas large amounts of translations of English or French texts can be found on the Internet, such resources are scarce for languages such as Latvian or Romanian, and they are practically nonexistent for the combination of two languages for which few resources exist.

Therefore the commission, through co-operation between its translators and its in-house scientists, is releasing large collections of sentences from legal documents covering technical, political and social issues which are available in 22 languages. In this translation repository it is possible to find sentences with their equivalent in all other official languages. Only Irish translations are not yet available. This release of language data is a good example of the commission's open policy of re-use of its information resources and follows the opening of the EU's documentary and terminological databases Eur-Lex and IATE.


View Full Story

You may use or reference this story with attribution and a link to
http://www.govtech.com/health/European-Commission-Makes-Computer-Assisted-Translation-More.html


| More

Comments


Add Your Comment

You are solely responsible for the content of your comments. We reserve the right to remove comments that are considered profane, vulgar, obscene, factually inaccurate, off-topic, or considered a personal attack.

GovTech Papers and Case Studies View Library


Sponsored Links



Phone RSS

Government Best Practices

» A New Model for Human Resources
» Abandoning the High Cost of Enterprise Content Management



Government Technology
Public CIO
Emergency Management
Digital Communities