Posted: 05/04/19
If you’ve ever had issues with Google Translate making a clear association between two languages, you are not alone. Researchers have been working to tackle this issue in the form of Machine Translation (MT) softwares that will give you the most accurate translations across borders.
A Pan-European consortium has released a dynamic machine translation router capable of smoothly switching between domain-specific translation engines to produce the highest possible quality MTs. The project, iADAATPA, detects the language and domain of a given document and routes it to the translation engine best suited for that content.
According to Euronews, most European countries have MT systems in place, however they frequently produce inaccurate translations. For example, Spain has an old system that mistranslated the name of the Ministry Dolores del Campo into “it is pain of field.” The mistake went unnoticed and was published in November, 2018 in a press release by the Ministry of Industry, Commerce and Tourism, causing global amusement.
iADAAPTA is a collaboration of researchers from Pangeanic (Spain), SEAD – the Secretary of State for Digital Advancement (Spain), Everis (Spain), Prompsit (Spain), SEGITUR (Spain), Tilde (Latvia), KantanMT (Ireland) and the ADAPT Centre at Dublin City University (Ireland). It is capable of switching between MT engines within a document for different parts of the document once it detects the document is talking about a new language domain. It also makes use of neural network algorithms based on artificial intelligence, instead of the traditional statistical MT methods based word sequence patterns.
The platform uses the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) building blocks eTranslation and eDelivery. Building blocks are the European Commission’s freely available standards-based digital solutions to help European public and/or private sector organisations develop digital services faster and more efficiently. ETranslation provides translation engines in seven EU domains and a web service to facilitate cross-border communication in all official EU languages, Icelandic and Norwegian.
Since the project was released, the iADAATPA platform has proven ready for consumer use based on an assessment of its language and domain detection abilities. Based on the positive outcome of the project, the Spanish Administration has decided to adopt iADAATPA, now called MT-hub platform, as a core component of their national translation infrastructure.
The consortium is now focusing on an extension of the project to get the word out to public administrations on this new service, and to help public administrations adopt a framework to manage MT services at different levels.
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