Strengthening linguistic diversity, connecting multilingual Europe and powering communication across languages
The German EU Council Presidency Translator is an AI-enhanced multilingual communication platform, which provides a secure translation interface where people can translate texts, documents and websites from/into all 24 official EU languages. It powers multilingualism in the digital age by offering users quick and simple tools to meet the multilingual challenges of the German EU Council Presidency.
- Presidency staff members can use the secure translation interface for instant translation of texts, documents and websites
- Journalists can quickly translate documents, press releases and local news sites
- Delegates can participate in multilingual meetings by quickly translating words and phrases during the meeting
- Translators can boost their productivity and efficiency by seamlessly integrating machine translation in their workflows via the SDL Trados plugin
- All EU citizens can use the public translation interface for their everyday translation needs.
Presidency Translator Toolkit
The EU Presidency Translator was developed by Tilde in close cooperation with the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), and funded by the German Foreign Office. The EU Presidency Translator is tailored to the European Union content and the needs of the German EU Council Presidency. The translations are powered by custom neural machine translation (NMT) engines developed by Tilde and general engines from the DKFI, DeepL, and eTranslation.
The EU Presidency Translator Project was pioneered back in 2015 when Latvia took over the Presidency of the Council of the European Union.
Challenge
A new EU Member State takes over the Presidency of the Council of the European Union every six months. During the six-month period, hosting countries deal with a massive amount of multilingual information and face a daunting demand for translation during a short period of time. There is also a pressing need for information to be translated in real time to facilitate access to information and information exchange during hundreds of events that take place during the Presidency.
Solution
To help Presidency’s delegates, journalists and guests deal with the language barrier, Tilde developed the EU Presidency Translator, which is a multilingual communication tool that powers instant translation of texts, documents and websites. The tool features a custom machine translator that was specially designed for Latvia’s Presidency and includes the world’s best machine translation engines for Latvian-English-Latvian translations. It was the first time when a machine translation tool was used at this prominent level to facilitate communication in the EU. It proved to be extremely successful and useful in overcoming the language barrier and has been used by all Presidencies ever since.
8
EU Council Presidencies supported
24
official EU languages
129+
million words translated
5+
million websites translated
123
countries represented
99%
positive feedback
Results
Since the first EU Presidency Translator in 2015 Tilde in collaboration with the European Commission’s CEF eTranslation team has developed fully customized neural machine translation solutions for Estonia, Bulgaria, Austria, Romania, Finland, Croatia, and is currently supporting the German Presidency of the Council of the European Union. It is important to note that the EU Presidency Translator is customized and adapted to the specific needs and languages of each Presidency. The EU Council Presidency Translator has played an important role in taking down the language barrier, connecting multilingual EU citizens and facilitating multilingual access to information and its exchange. The AI-powered translation toolkit offers secure data processing, instant translation of documents and websites without any changes in their formatting, multilingual access to information and its exchange, support tools for human translators, as well as other powerful features that facilitate the daily-to-day work of the Presidency staff and visitors. Solutions developed for the Council Presidencies are also available to the public free of charge at www.presidencymt.eu.