EU offers translated text for tech development

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The European Commission is offering access to a collection of a million sentences in 22 languages to help developers of translation systems and software.

As part of its remit, the EC translates as much of its own legal, political and other material as possible into the languages of member states, making it's collection of translated texts a great learning base for system developers.

Indeed, the EU has the most multilingual text in the world because each law must be translated into all official languages - meaning their translators must work with 253 possible language pair combinations across 1.5 million pages a year.

Leonard Orban, Commissioner for Multilingualism, said: "By this initiative the European Commission intends to boost human language technologies, support multilingualism and make computer-assisted translation easier, cheaper and more accessible.

While it's relatively easy to find English/French documents on the web to aid such development, it's much more difficult to find Latvian to Romanian, for example. "Citizens belonging to the smaller linguistic communities will have an easier access to documents and web pages only available in the most used languages," Orban said.

Because the text is offered in context, aside from helping decode idioms for translation software, it can also help develop and test grammar and spell checkers, online dictionaries and text classification systems, the EC said.

Janez Potoènik, European Commissioner for Science and Research, said: "This unique collection of language data contributes to the creation of a new generation of software tools for human language processing and helps foster the competitiveness of the language industry, which is already one of the fastest growing industries in the European Union."

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