iTranslate4.eu, the innovative machine translation portal was created as a result of a two year project funded by the EU. The Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (HAS) coordinated the development of the platform, which provides high quality translations even in the less-frequent language pairs, and offers up to five alternatives in the frequent ones.
Automatic online translation services aiming to support the better understanding of foreign languages, have constantly improved in quality around the world. The launch of http://www.iTranslate4.eu (Internet Translators for all European Languages) website is a significant step in this process. The primary aim of the project is to provide the best available machine translations among the languages of the EU. This free and public service is made available by a consortium of the best translation service providers of Europe (SYSTRAN, PROMT, Linguatec, MorphoLogic, Amebis, Sunda, pwn.pl, SkyCode, Trident) coordinated by the Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The website enables users to translate emails texts and websites and even carry out live chatting in all the official European languages and many more. These translations of course do not equal human translations, but they assist understanding among people and languages with an increasing efficiency.
The website uses 300 language engines and offers solutions in 45 languages including national languages, European minority languages and other world languages. Alternative translations are available in several language pairs. The simultaneously available multiple translations guarantee the best solutions as the users themselves can choose the one which helps most the understanding from the offered alternatives. It is also possible to evaluate and rank the translations online.
The special technology developed by iTranslate4.eu’s programmers connects the different translation systems.
The free http://www.itranslate4.eu website will soon offer further services on subscription. For individual users, it offers translation boxes which can be integrated into the user’s own website, translation plug-ins built in Firefox, as well as applications for popular chat programs. The website also has a public interface for programmers, which allows anyone to develop an own application.
