News

In our recent posting series, we are introducing our community to the people behind ELRC.

Exactly one week ago, people from all across Europe (and beyond) got together for the Fifth ELRC Conference. More than 450 participants from a variety of sectors, including European SMEs, public services as well as representatives from research and the LT industry joined the virtual event. This set a new record and marked a huge success for ELRC, showing the increasing awareness on the importance of language data and language technology.

Too often, research is hindered by a lack of cooperation between academia and industry. Different goals, priorities, the way of working, and last but not least financial conditions make it difficult to reconcile these two worlds and work together on a single project. However, when they overcome the obstacles synergy appears and great results are achieved.

eTranslation, the free and secure translation tool supported by the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF), has become over the years a benchmark for quality machine translations from and into all official EU languages – and much more. But the tool developers are not resting on their laurels: Since the beginning of 2021, eTranslation users could benefit from various new features and updates.

Information access at the time of COVID-19 pandemics is hampered by the amount and the reliability of information, as well as the many languages in which the information is provided. Language technologies can help. The COVID-19 MLIA initiative, endorsed by the European Commission's DG CNECT and coordinated by the University of Padua and ELRA/ELDA, has been launched in June 2020 to improve Multilingual Information Access in this specific context.