The goal of this project is to integrate the best machine translation services of all the major European MT providers in a single website that will offer free online machine translation from any official European language to any other. Translation between all European language pairs will be available by the partners' direct or linked translators. Service providers will advertise their extra translation services and also make profit from adverts sold here. The service will offer the best quality translation for every European language pair. To prove this our ranking we will provide reliable evaluation tests and publish the results. The site would be open to everyone. New competitors and challengers will be invited. We hope that this continuously updated evaluation site inspires competition between MT companies. The website will initiate community activities by collecting better translations, user evaluation and making access to human translators. The solution would share the task of covering many languages with other MT providers. This would enable us to focus on the languages in which we have the highest level of expertise. The collaboration of the leading MT companies of Europe might foster the development of new technologies and industry standards which will lead us to even better quality in machine translation.

Policy Context

The project is a part of the The Information and Communication Technologies Policy Support Programme PB Pilot Type B of the European Union.

The coordinator of the project is the Nyelvtudomanyi Intezet, Magyar Tudomanyos Akademia in Hungary and the partners are:

• SkyCode, Bulgaria
• Sunda Systems Oy, Finland
• Systran SA, France
• Promt GmbH and Linguatec GmbH Germany
• Morphologic Szamitastechnikai KFT  Hungary
• Pwn.pl Spolka z Ograniczona Odpowiedzialnoscia  Poland 
• SIA "Trident MT"  Republic of Latvia 
• Amebis programska oprema d.o.o. Kamnik  Republic of Slovenia 

Description of target users and groups

All active citizens in need of translation in the various combinations of European languages.

 

Description of the way to implement the initiative

Uniting leading European MT companies in one consortium, theiTranslate4 project will design and maintain a common translation portal for online translators in Europe. The translation portal will provide wide coverage translation for European languages, relying on joint effort by partners pooling their respective language services. The website will also include project-external free web translators to ensure complete coverage. By drawing on this wide array of MT providers the portal will not only offer full language coverage, but will also provide the best quality available.

The portal's core functionality will be quality machine translation of short texts and web pages for all official languages of Europe, several European minority languages as well as for some relevant world languages.

Additional features maximizing user friendliness include spell checking, virtual keyboard, automatic language detection, domain selection, translated search and an interface for technical feedback and user contribution.

The translation quality will be ensured by continuous supervision and evaluation, which will foster competition between the different providers on the site.

The portal will also serve as a gateway to professional human translators.

Technology solution

The technical backdrop is a web-based integration of online machine translation systems from different European countries.

A new common programming interface will be developed to help communication between the various translation systems. The network of servers will include a central server hosting the web portal and the software managing the communication, while the partner translators will be residing on local machines.

Technology choice: Proprietary technology

Main results, benefits and impacts

The project will develop the first European web portal providing free online translation across all European languages, offering each and every usable solution for the given language pair. Due to the competitive nature of the approach used, the portal will guarantee that users receive the best quality translator available.

The iTranslate4 project will span two years: during the first year the engine and the portal will be created, and it will be activated for the general public on 1 April 2011. The second year is devoted to operation, dissemination and exploitation. The consortium will try to attract the highest number of visitors and at the same time will also offer them alternative services.

We believe that our project is in full harmony with the European directives declared for the ICT-PSP projects:

It aims at a single European Information Space, strengthens innovation by cooperation and achieves an Inclusive Information Society offering free online translation on a common website.

Track record of sharing

All machine translator providers are welcome to join the itranslate4.eu services! We encourage you to make your translator available to users through the iTranslate4 portal, which will offer the following advantages:

• Promotion of your MT services form a website with heavy traffic.
• Useful resources generated by user feedback, suggestions and comparison of different translators.
• Membership in a community of Europe's leading MT companies.
• Commercial exploitation of your service in web applications requiring full coverage.

Lessons learnt

This field will be completed by the submitter when the lessons learnt have been identified and understood.

Interested parties are encouraged to visit the website at http://itranslate4.eu/ [archived link].

Scope: Pan-European