iADDATPA becomes MT-Hub - Machine Translation for EU Public Administrations

Pangeanic Announces Successful Conclusion of CEF Project 2016-EU-IA-0132

Following the final presentation at Public Administrations in Madrid (Spain), iADAATPA-MT-Hub will provide a single access point to multiple vendors, making it easier for EU Public Administrations to adopt machine translation.

iADAATPA (Intelligent, Automatic, Domain-Adapted Automatic Translation for Public Administrations) became MT-Hub, which was launched on February 28th. This solution has been designed by a consortium of machine translation vendors (KantanMT, Prompsit, Tilde) led by Pangeanic with Everis and Dublin City College as partners.

The platform provides machine translation for EU Public Administrations and supports the European Commission's efforts to promote technology adoption and modernize EU Public Administrations' digital infrastructure. The mission of the project was to provide a highly secure (AS/4-compliant, Domibus) and scalable infrastructure service serving as a Digital Service Infrastructure (DSI).

The development of the program was carried out by the iADAATPA consortium, which received funding from the European Commission's Innovation and Networks Executive Agency (INEA Grant No. INEA/CEF/ICT/A2016/1331703). It was the largest financial investment CEF had made to date in machine translation technologies and related infrastructure, acknowledged as a milestone investment in the future of Neural MT for the European Union.

Consortium and Partners

Beyond the 4 commercial partners involved in machine translation (Pangeanic, KantanMT, Prompsit, Tilde), there was Everis as the main coordinator of Pangeanic's proposal,  and university partner DCU, the project received a high degree of interest for implementation by Public Administrations in Spain (Valencia's regional Government "Generalitat" Open Data and Transparency Department, as well as Spain's agency Segittur and the authority for language technologies and Digital Advancement at Public Administrations, SESIAD). Partner Tilde involved the Lithuanian Parliament as a service user.

MT-Hub is designed to accelerate pan-European connectivity, improve access to digital services by promoting the use of machine translation for EU Public Administrations, facilitate interoperability between digital services, and link national infrastructures to the existing core EC's eTranslation services.

Platform Launch and Open Source Release

The platform was officially launched in February 2019, with KantanMT leading the technical implementation and hosting. As announced by the consortium, the ALPHA version was released in April 2018, followed by the BETA release in September 2018. As an EU-funded project, the code for this new technology platform is currently available to the Open Source Community at https://github.com/iADAATPA under the GNU General Public License v3.0.

"iADAATPA has marked a no-turning-back point for our history. The challenge was massive as we had to overcome commercial and architectural preferences. But it has been a wonderful challenge and levels of professionalism very high. All development teams have worked well in synch and Everis has been very professional in their testing and management, finding the potential deployment scenarios for the platform. We are delighted that we have successfully reached the target as set by CEF." — Manuel Herranz, CEO

Pangeanic has been in charge of the platform's security features and of overseeing the proper development of the architecture, with coding done at KantanMT.

Key Technologies

The following major technologies are included in the platform:

• Automatic Domain Detection and Translation request routing
• Language Detection
• RESTful SDK (Software Development Kit)
• Private browsing of web pages
• Synchronous & Asynchronous translation capabilities
• AS4 Domibus security
• Marketplace for machine translation vendors to provide domain-specific and generic engines to Public Administrations
• A range of CAT Connectors for: SDL TRADOS, MateCAT, Drupal, OmegaT, OpenCMS, Browser Plugins.