Story of the German EU Council Presidency Translator

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

🖥️ Translation Platform

The EU Council Presidency Translator offers a secure online translation environment where users can instantly translate texts, documents, and websites.

🌍 Multilingual Website

The website translation plugin instantly translates any site into any of the 24 official EU languages making the respective site accessible to non-German and non-English visitors.

💬 Translation Assistant

The online CAT tool with customized translation memory offers unique translation functionality to enhance user experience and deliver tailor-made translations.

🧩 SDL Trados Plugin

Professional translators can seamlessly integrate custom neural machine translation systems in their professional environment.

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.

History of the Project

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.

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.