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Since March 2020, European small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can now also benefit from the European Commission’s machine translation (MT) system eTranslation. Before making this big and important step, the European Commission conducted a consultation to better understand their needs, interests and potential use cases in the field of Language Technology (LT).

Multilingualism and linguistic diversity are an essential part of the European identity. However, the EU's 24 official languages can also create language barriers that prevent seamless communication between individuals, businesses and public institutions across borders and languages. Especially during the EU Presidency, many texts have to be translated into different languages.

One of the key challenges faced by public administrations across Europe was how to obtain and secure the use of translation memories produced by external providers. Until recently, all efforts undertaken by national authorities to gather data from translation contracts had been thwarted by several factors including legal vacuum, IP uncertainty and technical shortcomings.

Named entities play a key role in the performance of machine translation (MT) systems. However, sometimes, they can be challenging and complicate the machine translation process.

The European Commission is offering €1.8 millions of funding for a pilot project with the goal to ensure digital language equality in Europe.