EFSA is expanding its linguistic diversity by offering its online communications in a further 14 European languages: Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian, Irish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Romanian, Slovak and Slovenian. The EFSA website is now available in all the 24 official languages of the European Union.
This new milestone marks the culmination of an ambitious project to gradually introduce full EU-24 multilingualism to EFSA’s web communications. The project was originally conceived in response to the introduction of the European Transparency Regulation, which calls on EFSA to be as accessible and inclusive as possible when communicating food risks to EU citizens.
Significant advances in the technologies used to provide translation services such as artificial intelligence and automated neural translation presented EFSA with the opportunity to expand the scope of its translation processes. EFSA decided to integrate the European Commission’s machine translation tool eTranslation into its website to make its digital content accessible to more European citizens and stakeholders.
What is eTranslation?
eTranslation is a free, automated tool that translates text excerpts or complete documents. It can be integrated into digital systems to embed them with translation capabilities.
Machine translation
eTranslation applies appropriate terminology and style for different contexts and domains, including the public health domain, drawing upon decades of work by EU translators. It is regularly fed with Euramis, the EU’s largest translation memory comprising over 1 billion sentences in the 24 official EU languages
How does it work in practice?
You can access any of the 24 language versions via a language switcher on EFSA’s website. The page will first load in English and an automatic translation can be requested with a click. The page will reload in a few seconds with the machine-translated version.
