Rome, 3rd August 2020

Translated has been selected by the European Parliament to automatically transcribe and translate parliamentary multilingual debates in real-time, covering the 24 official languages used by the institution. The purpose of this endeavor is to facilitate communication between members, opening up debates to all EU citizens and also creating better accessibility for those with disabilities. The service will be provided by new software available both through fully-localized web and mobile applications and live streaming APIs for third-party developers. It will be the first human-in-the-loop speech translation system and will leverage context and user feedback to adapt the output in less than one second.

The product will be developed in collaboration with two companies that have already worked with Translated in building innovative products for professional translators:

• Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK), a world-leading research center in MT and automatic speech recognition (ASR);
• PerVoice, an ASR world-leading provider.

Within the next 12 months, the Italian consortium will release a prototype to be tested by the European Parliament together with up to two other solutions as per the rules of the call for tender. The best-performing tool will be confirmed as the official one for the next 2 years.

The new product is not a simple concatenation of ASR and MT, but a new, fully integrated system where the MT algorithms are tolerant of ASR errors, this way avoiding propagating imperfections. This approach will not only help deliver much more contextualized translations, but it will also present an opportunity to improve the quality of the output while the plenary session is happening. This is possible thanks to the human correction feedback that is facilitated by the tool, allowing end-users and the team of professional translators to share corrections.

Some of the new AI models that will be used have already been put at work successfully in products such as ModernMT (an MT that improves from corrections and adapts to the context, named a Gartner Cool Vendor in 2019), Matecat (a computer-assisted translation tool that makes post-editing easy), and Matesub (the first subtitling tool offering suggestions during transcription, now in beta and due to be released in September 2020).

Envisaged for decades, speech translation technology is now developed enough to be put to use. Not only is it real-time, robust, and language-independent, it also supports all EU languages, all speakers, all domains as well as both spontaneous and formal speech.

About Translated

Translated is a translation company that pioneered the use of artificial intelligence to help professional translators. It was founded in 1999 by computer scientist Marco Trombetti and linguist Isabelle Andrieu and has always been focused on a powerful combination of human creativity and machine intelligence to craft consistent quality translations at speed. Today, it is one of the most successful online translation companies in the world, with 180,000 clients, offering translation in 177 languages in 40 areas of expertise. Translated has been rewarded on several occasions, including the TAUS Innovation Contest. In 2015, the European Commission recognized Translated’s CAT tool Matecat as one of the best AI research projects of the previous 7 years. In 2017, Financial Times included Translated as one of Europe's fastest-growing companies.