The creation of a Single Market Digital (or “Digital Single Market”) Europe is a key objective of the European Commission for 2020. While the Digital Single Market is basically multilingual , on the other hand so far most of the European languages could not receive appropriate support from the technology language that would enable a job, a life and a truly trade without borders . Indeed, the richness of the diversity and linguistic diversity becomes a hindrance if the free exchange of information is hindered, if the impartial access to public services, trade opportunities, work and support are prevented.
the language of the invisible boundaries in Europe
in the emerging Digital Single market, the language barriers create invisible boundaries: while 99% of European enterprises are small and medium-sized enterprises.
Only 7% of SMEs can sell beyond the borders, to consumers who speak a different language.
Similarly, 90% of European customers prefer to navigate the website in their own language.
An adequate support on the side of the linguistic technologies would ensure the multilingual bringing significant benefits both the economy and for society: it is estimated that a Digital Single market could actually create up to 340 billion euro of additional growth , hundreds of thousands new jobs and a truly knowledge-based society.
the benefits derived from new opportunities
the European Commission has taken an important step in support of a truly multilingual Digital Single market, creating the conditions for public services for European citizens and businesses are able to operate freely without language barriers. The Automatic Translation Platform developed within the European program “Connecting Europe Facility” (CEF.AT) will facilitate the multilingual communication and document exchange and other linguistic content in Europe between national public administrations, and between them and European citizens and businesses. The CEF.AT platform will operate in various scenarios of public administration in areas such as, for example, Consumer Protection , your health, your public contracts , social security and culture . Will play a central role in raising public online services, such as Europeana, the portal of the Open Data platform and online dispute resolution.
With the support of CEF.AT service, public administrations in Europe will operate by reducing or even breaking down the language barriers.
the technology behind public services without borders
the technology behind the platform CEF.AT is represented by a statistical machine translation system, [email protected], learning how to translate a text from existing translations.
in a statistical approach to machine translation, data such as collections of mono and bilingual texts, dictionaries, terminologies, ontologies and their names repertoires play a central role as they provide the evidence based on which the machine translation system “learns” to translate a text from a source language to a target language.
[email protected] in its current state is available for free for all European public services, under the CEF program.
So far, the system is mainly trained on translations of EU legislation and the texts produced by the EU institutions: this fact makes the system not always able to fully meet the needs and demands that arise on a daily basis by European national public services.
in order to improve the machine translation service provided by the European Commission, it is necessary specializzarlo in relation to the needs and peculiarities of national and European public administrations: this objective can be achieved by enriching the linguistic evidence available to the machine translation system with textual data and linguistic (mono- and bi-Lingui) collected by national institutions such as ministries, government, public authorities and non-governmental organizations.
Through the action “European Language Resources Coordination” (ELRC) within the European program “Connecting Europe Facility”, the European Commission is undertaking one raising effort of textual and linguistic data unprecedented as the first step in the direction of specialization of CEF.AT in relation to the needs and peculiarities of services public of EU Member States, Iceland and Norway, thus creating the conditions for the provision of multilingual services for citizens, governments and businesses in Europe. In this way, the ELRC action will not only help to bridge the gap between the machine translation services currently offered by the European Commission and the actual daily needs of national public services in Europe, but will also contribute significantly to the survival of the national languages European.
Seminar ELRC in Italy
on behalf of the European Commission, the ELRC consortium is organizing a series of national seminars in each of the 30 participating countries raise awareness about the importance of textual and linguistic data is held by public authorities: it is a textual heritage that can significantly contribute to the specialization of the results of machine translation systems and where there is more awareness about its value. In order to involve all stakeholders in making CEF.AT platform tailored to their needs, ELRC invites all representatives of public administrations in Europe to attend the event being organized in your country.
in Italy, the organization of the event has been entrusted to the Institute of computational linguistics “Antonio Zampolli” of National research Council , which operates in the field of computational linguistics since 1967: the Workshop will be held next March 15 in Rome at the headquarters of the European Commission Representation in Italy (Palace of the bell-ringers, Via IV Novembre 149).
the Italian workshop will involve speakers from the European Commission, representatives of national governments and government agencies, to get to language service providers and language technologies that will compare to understand the needs of national public sector in the field of machine translation, to make a survey and data collection related to the Italian language and discuss technical and legal problems associated with their use for automatic translation.
Note: participation in the workshop is free but requires registration.
Simonetta MONTEMAGNI
Institute of Computational Linguistics “Antonio Zampolli” (ILC) – CNR
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