Pangeanic spreads awareness on EU commissioned project at Meet Central Europe

Pangeanic participated at Meet Central Europe. We have long championed technological innovation and development. With our very own cloud-based translation technologies; Cor, Activa TM and our Neural Machine Translation and AI division PangeaMT, we understand it is paramount for the industry to adapt to the fast-paced and disruptive nature of technology.

Our latest endeavor, awarded by the European Commission, will see Pangeanic working towards the creation of a National European Central Translation Memory Data Platform (NEC TM DATA). Three months into the project, our team is diligently working on the technical specifications of the cloud-based infrastructure and data mining for the first white paper on public translation contracts, set to be published this February. But what exactly is NEC TM? Simply put, NEC TM will be Europe’s central, cloud-based solution for data-sharing, where member states will use Translation Memories as shareable data and general data, to be put to use for machine learning. Pangeanic envisioned NEC TM through the lens of industry’s best practices, with the aim of invigorating the public sector with the profitability and efficiency brought about by technology. With its 24 official languages, there is no surprise the EU and its member states are huge buyers of translation services, purchasing many millions of euros worth of translation contracts annually. NEC TM would not only be cost-effective, but also align with the European Commission’s goal to support and promote the centralization, sharing and re-use of data. In a strive to raise awareness of the project and promote better data-sharing practices, Pangeanic’s team jetted off to Meet Central Europe in Budapest this month, where they networked with several LSPs and national representatives of the Association of Translation Companies across member states. The event at large confirmed our belief that the translation industry is under large-scale transformation. With technological advancements in Natural Language Processing and the rapid atomisation of translation workflows, we recognize the need for translation companies to shift their practices towards a culture that integrates Machine Translation and to think in terms of generating Big Data.

Meet Central Europe also provided us with the opportunity to introduce NEC TM during the workshop session GDPR Lessons Learned. We identified and discussed with the attendees the challenges ahead for us and the importance of providing anonymization solutions within the NEC TM system; a strive to protect personal information and fully comply with the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that went into force in May 2018. Without question, personal data misuse and inadequate data handling and collection are burning issues within the translation industry, especially as Machine Translation integration increases. In September, Slator reported on a privacy breach at Translate.com, where sensitive data had been leaked onto Google’s search engines; a physician’s email exchange with a global pharmaceutical company on tax matters, termination letters and late payment notices amongst other information had been indexed and made available online. Undoubtedly, questions on data protection and privacy, will run central to the architecture of the NEC TM platform, as will the need to continue to spread awareness on the question of data and the importance of fostering language resources to be put to use for automated translation solutions. With The European Commission’s pursuit of boosting AI digital economies and European integration, NEC TM will allow for efficient data-sharing practices across member states and facilitate the economic aspects of the re-use of information. At Pangeanic, our team will embark on a busy season as the focus lays on building such a system and gathering thousands of unexploited national bilingual assets (TMs) across member states. Don’t forget to keep an eye out on our pan-european data sharing awareness info days at nec-tm.eu to stay in-the- know on the critical issues faced by translation companies today.