The European Union announced recently that it plans to give more power to AI translation machines through a pilot project which will see some press releases translated without the benefit of human oversight.
According to an online article, the project will allow immediate access to Commission press releases in each of the EU’s 24 working languages.
High-tech machine translation equipment will translate chosen press releases without a human translator proofreading or editing the release.
It is hoped that this will cut waiting time for release of information and also offer additional language options to the public.
The move is a milestone in the Commission’s drive to automate its translation department which is one of the oldest and largest within the EU.
Originally introduced in 2013 in a bid to cope with the rising amount of legislation and associated translations, machine translation has also meant fewer translators are now being hired by the EU, with the translation department shrinking by 17% since 2013.
However, over the last decade, there has also been an increase in workload with EU figures stating that the number of translations has risen from 2million pages to 2.5million pages.
But translators insist that humans in the EU’s dedicated unit remain essential to spotting any mistakes and adapting machine-translated texts to EU requirements.
The online article states that Eric Mamer (a Commission spokesperson) announced that “under a new pilot project, it will immediately publish automated translations, marked by a disclaimer, while a human version is in the works.”
“This new tool will ensure that you have access to translations of our press material in the language of your choice faster, right from the moment of publication, and give you access to more translations in general,” Mamer stated during a media briefing.
He added that “We will continue providing you with the human professional translation of our press material, which will replace machine translations as soon as they are available”.
Under the current press release system, EU translators only translate in French, English, German and other languages, as relevant for the subject matter.
However, the new project will allow immediate access to Commission press releases in each of the EU’s 24 official languages, which are:
Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish and Swedish.
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