News Archive / EU machine translation project 01.12.2010

EU agencies spend approximately one billion euros per annum on translating documents between the 23 official EU languages. If a machine translation project funded by the organization is successful, in the future, this sum could be reduced considerably.

In contrast to Google's online translation service, the Molto Project (Multi-lingual Online Translation), which has been awarded a grant of €2.3 million, aims to deliver as precise a translation as possible. The focus is on precision rather than completeness. The target group consists of companies and institutions that rely on correctly translated websites and other documentation, rather than end users and consumers. The developers make use of domain specific grammar and ontology, implemented using the open source Grammatical Framework (GF).

The objective of the research project is to create machine translation systems for three domains as proof of concept. The experience gained on the way should make the creation of such systems easier and quicker in the future. A beta version of the software should be available by the middle of this year. The project will run until February 2013 and most of the software developed is to be made freely available under the LGPL.

source: http://www.h-online.com

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