Joinup, the European Union’s public sector open source news website, reports today that MT@EC, the Machine Translation service developed by the European Commission under the ISA programme, can now also be accessed over a secure (https) internet connection; previously it was only accessible to institutions connected to the highly secure sTESTA network. The new web access now also allows public administrations that are not connected to the sTESTA network to request access for their staff.
MT@EC is currently available free of charge to all public sector organisations. Since the tool has been trained mainly on official EU documents, it can handle and translate texts and documents related to EU policy and collaboration in the 24 official EU languages better than other tools. A presentation of the MT@EC service, including screenshots of the user interface, is available as a PDF. Interested organisations have the opportunity to participate in ‘customisation pilot projects’, concerning which more information can be found in the document “ΜT for Member States: Description of pilots” (PDF).
In this 2nd major release of MT@EC, the quality of the output has been further improved by adding data from more sources and by enhancing the processing for the current 6th generation of the machine translation engines. Users can now also submit PDF files, whilst support for other formats has been improved. Furthermore, language auto-detection is now available for text snippets. Users can drag and drop files if they are using the interface through the Firefox or Chrome web browsers. Users can also choose not to receive the translated text by email for confidentiality reasons but instead download it from their personal workspace in the interface.
The European Commission (DG Translation) is organising a user conference on the machine translation service on 5th December 2014 in Brussels.