Two of our members involved in developing hybrid approaches to machine translation took part in the last Marie Curie EXPERT Summer School meeting in...
2 min read
19/09/2018
The third meeting of the Consortium of the European Project iADAATPA was held between May 31st and June 1st, 2018 in Elche, Alicante.
The meeting was hosted by partner PROMPSIT, a company related to the Department of Software and Computing Systems of the University of Alicante, specialized in the creation of customized machine translation solutions. iADAATPA, which stands for Intelligent, Automatic Domain Adapted Automated Translation for Public Administrations, is a project dedicated to delivering a scalable and secure platform for automated translation services by integrating, using and extending the EU’s Automated Translation platform (MT@EC). As described in iADAATPA: Pangeanic’s consortium awarded the largest EU contract by CEF to build secure machine translation services, this project will help to promote the adoption of the Automated Translation Building Block by easing the integration of automated translation into cross-border European digital services, along with serving as a successful use case for future implementations at local, regional and national levels and by different administrations.iADAATPA Elche Meeting highlights
The iADAATPA Elche meeting was an opportunity to plan the last stages, as the iADAATPA project is already halfway to being completed and is way ahead of schedule. “The project involves four machine translation vendors and one university, but also public services in several countries such as Spain and Lithuania”, said Manuel Herranz, Pangeanic’s CEO. He also expressed that iADAATPA promotes the access to free machine translation for public administrations, both synchronous and asynchronous, stressing that all of this is possible through state-of-the-art EU development.
Tony O’Dowd, Founder and Chief Architect of KantanMT, spoke about Europe’s particular environment, as we work on 26 official languages and topics vary from general administration to medical fields. With this in mind, he considers it very difficult to develop a single translation engine. iADAATPA will be a marketplace for public bodies with access to Machine Translation in a simple environment. Raúl Juanes, Head of Public Sector Levante Region at Everis, also stressed that the iADAATPA Project initiative is fully aligned with the European Commission Digital Agenda, creating closer and more inclusive interactions between public administrations and private citizens. Access to public information is a fundamental right, regardless of the topic or the language in which it was written, and the project will help to achieve this goal. It also had other highlights, with the visit of Aitana J. Mas Mas, Head of the Directorate-General of Transparency and Participation, and representative of Pangeanic’s/Everis’ Use Case in Spain at Generalitat Valenciana. Her executive center programs and executes the policies of the regional government and exercises its competences related to transparency in the public activity and participation of the civil society and citizen. During the meeting, she voiced the opinion of Valencia’s regional government: “Over the last 3 years, we have been working hard on a strong open government strategy, so this project is very important to our regional government to improve the tools and skills for citizens to obtain this information from administration”. She also added that “there is a strong emphasis on cleaning the image of the region after known cases of corruption and that is why we really believe in open government and open data.” Overall, the different partners present at the iADAATPA Elche meeting presented the status of their project tasks and emphasis was made on having contact with national authorities in order to define the first use case among the EU Public Administrations. The beta testing of the platform will be performed by entities such as the following:
- SEGITTUR (Spain)
- GVA (Spain)
- BOE and Regional Official Gazettes (Spain)
- Dublin University (Ireland)
- Irish Parliament (Ireland)
- Lithuanian Parliament (Lithuania)