The European Commission's work is facilitated by the use of Information Technology in 23 different languages.

European Commission Upgrades Translation System with SOA and AI

The European Commission is enhancing its translation process by implementing a service-oriented architecture (SOA) and advanced artificial intelligence (AI) tools. This move aims to improve the quality and consistency of the Commission’s translation production, particularly in response to a 5% budget cut agreed upon by EU leaders in February 2013.

The Commission’s translation system, which communicates among its 27 member states using around 2,500 translators and translation support staff, is undergoing a significant upgrade. At the heart of these changes is the Commission’s IT unit at the EU’s directorate-general for translation, which is upgrading its Trados implementation.

Trados, a translation support software from SDL, is a familiar tool for the Commission’s translators. The new version of Trados will come with application programming interfaces (APIs), allowing more effective integration with back-end systems. This will accelerate the distribution of documents to translators, enabling more sophisticated workflow functionality.

The combination of the new API-enabled Trados and the SOA infrastructure will also allow managers to track the progress of translation work in real time. The new version of Trados will not require translators to worry about formatting or the risk of file corruption, as it will work with XML data extracted from documents, reducing the need for translators to work in Microsoft Word.

The Commission’s translation system also makes use of a linguistic repository called Euramis. Built on an Oracle database and taking up 373 GB of storage, Euramis contains over 700 million sentences in every available language. When a translator is working on a particular sentence, Trados brings up any relevant sentences from Euramis and the machine translation for reference.

The aim is for translators to reuse previously translated sentences or parts of them in new translations, enhancing accuracy and harmonization across languages. The European Commission’s efforts in this regard are part of its broader digital transformation initiatives, leveraging AI to support multilingual communication efficiently.

Documents are submitted to the Commission via an online portal called Poetry. Approximately 2 million pages of text are translated annually by the Commission, with priority given to legal documents, then citizen communications, and then other texts. The Commission’s translation process relies heavily on information technology, playing a crucial role in ensuring efficient and accurate communication among its member states.

The European Commission's work is facilitated by the use of Information Technology in 23 different languages.