During Germany's EU Council Presidency Translator in 2020, the German EU Council Presidency Presidency Translator translated websites, documents and texts entered directly on the translation page into and from all EU languages, allowing EU citizens to communicate across languages and borders. The German Federal Foreign Office supported the development of the free machine translation service and integrated German and European high-tech AI, provided by leading centers of excellence and companies such as the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), DeepL, and Tilde, as well as eTranslation, the European Commission's machine translation system.
In the six months of the German EU Presidency, the MT tool was used in 139 countries and translated more than its six predecessors combined. These record figures clearly show the increasing demand for multilingual content and the society's growing openness to using machine translation for both professional and private purposes.
In a recent article in the Frankfurter Rundschau, Prof. Josef van Genabith, head of the research department "Multilinguality and Language Technology" at DFKI and project leader of the German Presidency Translator, explained the secret behind the success of today's state-of-the-art MT systems: "Neural networks are incredibly powerful." Nevertheless, he stated that professional translators still cannot be replaced by MT: "Human translators of the future will correct and certify the machine translations as post-editors."
To the full article (in German): https://www.fr.de/zukunft/storys/technologie/sprechen-ist-nicht-denken-wie-maschinen-die-sprache-erobern-90197634.html.
All publications on the German EU Council Presidency Translator can be found in the press review.
