Seimas and Lithuanian PresidencyConsideration of EU Matters in Seimas 
HomepagePress ReleasesMediaParliamentary GlossaryLinksContacts

Interparliamentary meeting addressed the problems and prospects of machine translation

Friday, 27 September 2013 SendPrint

Meeting of the Chairpersons of the Committees on Education, Science and Culture and the Committees on the Development of Information Society titled United in Diversity: Political and Social Development Aspects of EU Languages and Cultures takes place in the Seimas of the Republic of Lithuania. The first part of the event deals with machine translation of European languages: problems, challenges and prospects.

 

 

Dr Sabine Kirchmeier-Andersen, Director of the Danish Language Council, addressed the importance of every language in the global development process: “Every language is closely connected to the people who use it, their environment, their culture, and most of all their common history. Most of our cultural heritage is encoded in our languages – words, phrases, idiomatic expressions and proverbs are usually best understood with reference to events in history, great literature or the words of great men and women.”

The speaker drew attention to the fact that it was no coincidence that the boost of inventions and ideas started in the 19th century exactly at the same time as Latin seized to be the common language of science. “From then on each scientist started to describe the world in his own language and from his own local innovative perspective,” stressed the representative of Denmark.

Today, machine translation services are available on almost all devices, and the number of languages combinations that are offered for automatic translation is constantly increasing. Today, information systems can adapt automatically not only to the choices that we make, but also to the content of the words we write in emails or on social networks however a number of issues remain unsolved admits Dr Kirchmeier-Andersen, who has been working in the field of language technology for 27 years.

“I also know that leaving the care for our languages to market forces is absolutely counterproductive. It has not and will not ensure diversity and multilingual coverage, but only survival of the biggest. If we want to have the technology that can overcome language barriers for our countries we have to make sure that we have our own resources and our own expertise, and that we stimulate language industry nationally as well as internationally. In order to find out how this can be done, one has to understand one thing about language technology – it develops only if it has access to language resources such as electronic documents and recorded speech. And lots of it,” Ms Kirchmeier-Andersen said.

Maria Cristina De Preter, Head of the Portuguese Language Department of the Directorate General for Translation of the European Commission, agreed with the opinion of Ms Kirchmeier-Andersen. According to her, the European Commission decided to promote machine translation in order to support some of its major policies, for example completing the Internal Market. Directorate General for Translation was charged with the mission of creating and running the MT@EC service to satisfy the needs of the EU institutions, of initiatives like Internal Market Information system, e-Health and e-Justice and of the Member States administrations, which are all tools to better include citizens and provide them with better public services.

In the words of Ms De Preter, machine translation performance is not equal for all the language pairs. For the Romance languages, like Portuguese or Italian, machine translation is very useful, while for highly‑inflected/morphologically-rich languages like Lithuanian, its degree of usefulness is typically (much) lower. Translators would be very useful in eliminating these deficiencies.

“But translators can also help improve the quality of machine translation output. Both indirectly, by producing high‑quality translations that are used to train machine translation engines and directly, by giving detailed feedback that may be used to improve the engines,” believes Ms De Preter. According to her, it is worthwhile to invest in machine translation. Besides the cooperation among the EU institutions, it is very important to create synergies for cooperation between the Directorate General for Translation, national administrations and academia, both in the areas of language technologies and translation studies.

Dr Algirdas Saudargas, Member of the European Parliament, believes that a European strategy is needed for machine translation as well as for digitalisation of language and culture. It is necessary to set the objectives of language technology and foresee language development in the context of converging technologies; identifying objectives that generate strategic added value (but are not attractive in economic terms) and developing political solutions is also of crucial importance. “Language technologies have to be assessed in the context of converging technologies and cognitive sciences. We have to look for ways to solve the problem in way that small communities would be able to catch up with larger communities and that all languages could catch up with the English language. We discuss the projects that are developed not by a business community, because these projects do not ensure return on investment but rather have a strategic value. We have to attract market attention to this field. Similar things are being done in the energy sector, I think, the same approach could be applied in the field of language technology”, Dr Saudargas said.

Jan Truszczyński, Director General of the Directorate General for Education and Culture of the European Commission, briefly outlined the topics of the international conference titled Unity in diversity: languages for mobility, jobs and active citizenship hosted by the Seimas on 25–26 September 2013. The topics were the following: employment and language skills necessary to find a job; challenges of language teaching and learning, in particular making learning more attractive and significance of translation and interpretation for active participation in public life.

“Translation and interpretation are crucial for democracy and for giving to all citizens, regardless of their origin and language skills, the opportunity to exercise their rights and to take an active part in society. Let me say that this is at the heart of the multilingualism policy of the EU institutions,” underlined Mr Truszczyński who also presented the latest initiative of the European Commission Opening up Education aimed at promotion of innovation and digital skills in schools and universities. “It is all about using new technology and open educational resources to improve skills development. Our starting point was the general realisation that while information and communication technologies have become an integral part of our daily lives, they are still under-used in schools and universities. If Europe fully exploits the new technology and the new opportunities offered by free online courses and other open educational resources, it can make its education and training systems more effective, flexible and accessible,” Mr Truszczyński said.

 

Saulė Eglė Trembo, Public Relations Unit, tel. +370 5 239 6203, e-mail: [email protected]

 


Video Address by Mrs Loreta GRAUŽINIENĖ, Speaker of the Seimas of the Republic of Lithuania


Address by Mr Gediminas KIRKILAS, Deputy Speaker of the Seimas, Chair of the Committee on European Affairs


Address by Mr Petras AUŠTREVIČIUS, Deputy Speaker of the Seimas, responsible for organisation of the parliamentary dimension events of the Lithuanian Presidency of the Council of the EU

© Office of the Seimas, 2024