Topic: Initiatives and Tools that developed and used at the EC DGT
The European Commission’s Directorate-General for Translation (DGT) is one of the largest translation services in the world DGT translates more than 2 million pages of texts every year, most of them are legal texts. As the demand for translation is constantly growing, staff numbers are shrinking and the nature of the texts means that it is not always safe to use products developed by private companies, DGT has long been developing machine translation technology.
The eTranslation developed by DGT is now available not only to DGT translators but also to external users. However, DGT has not limited itself to machine translation. In recent years, AI based tools have been rapidly developed and improved and are now available not only to staff of the European Commission and other EU institutions but also to external users. These include eBriefing for the production of reports on official dossiers, eReply for the preparation of replies to queries, requests and questions, and WebText for the enhancement of texts in English, French or German with the help of AI, eSummary to produce a summary of the most important information in a document, Speech-to-Text to convert speech into text, etc.
It is important to note that most of these AI-based language tools concern not only widely spoken languages, but also all EU languages, which are not always on the radar of language technology developers. The development of these tools not only contributes to the core functions of the DGT, but also to the accessibility of these tools for users of different languages and skills.
