1 MBRelated EU activities
Within the European Commission and the wider framework of the European Institutions a lot of work is being done in related fields of human translation, multilingualism and language technologies.
DG Education & Culture - Multilingualism
The Education and Culture Directorate General has as one of its missions to foster and promote language learning at all levels in order to empower citizens to make full use of the opportunities available in Europe. At the same time it promotes multilingualism to preserve linguistic diversity in Europe and as a link to other cultures. This is achieved among others by means of policy instruments, such as the Communication adopted in September 2008 entitled "Multilingualism an asset for Europe and a shared commitment".
DG Translation
This is the in-house translation service of the EC. It provides high-quality written translation by translators from all the Member States.Their brochures, magazines, e-zines and websites cater for language professionals and the general public. For more details visit their home page on Europa.
The European Parliament
The multilingualism policy of the EP is explained clearly on their website. The European Parliament collected a corpus of parallel text in 11 languages from the proceedings of the Parliament. The corpus has been widely used in the Natural Language Processing Community. It was also one of the resources used in the TC-STAR project. You can download it here: Europarl corpus
Joint Research Centre (JRC)
The Joint Research Centre (JRC) has been using language technologies and tools for over 10 years now with the objective of managing the information flow and overcoming language barriers. Their aim is to support the European Commission and Member States in these objectives.
Text analysis tools
To this end they have developed some very interesting tools for the retrieval, analysis and visualisation of information with a focus on multilinguality. You can find a comprehensive description of all the tools on the JRC website. Of special interest is their Europe Media Monitor, a tool which gathers world-wide news in 43 languages, and then among other things classifies the articles, analyses the news texts and presents it in a user-friendly way. Read the press release
Distribution of language resources
The JRC also assists the Commission in the distribution of its multilingual linguistic resources. Among these are the JRC-Aquis and the DGT Translation Memory (DGT-TM). The Aquiscommunautaire is the total body of EU law. The JRC-Acquis is probably the biggest corpus of its kind worldwide. The DGT-TM is a collection of sentences and their translations taken from all of the documentation of the Acquiscommunautaire plus other documents. DGT-TM represents years of collective memory of all EC translation. Using it means that already existing sentences do not need to be translated again. Both the DGT Translation Memory and the JRC-Acquis cover 22 languages and involve all 231 language pairs. What makes them outstanding is that they include less widely used languages and language pairs i.e. Estonian-Maltese. You can download detailed information about each of the resources by following the links above.
Council of the European Union
The Council of the European Union also recognises the importance of promoting multilingualism and recently published a Resolution to this effect.
This page is maintained by: Susan Fraser
