Language Intelligence for the right purpose
For a democratic and prosperous Europe, it is vital to ensure that all EU languages are available as digital resources for all communities within the framework of legislation to safeguard transparency. The European Commission was therefore essentially looking for a partner to support a highly complex multilingual process with the higher purpose of turning the EU into a smart, sustainable and inclusive economy.
The scope
Semantix is providing a complete solution for the translation of all official technical regulations within the EU. Representing a total value of EUR 34 million, the service contract is one of the largest in Europe and covers translation between all 23 European languages – a total of 506 possible language combinations.
The content is highly technical and regulatory by nature with a wide spread of specialisations. The classification contains 13 different domains, ranging from construction and agriculture to pharmaceuticals, energy, and goods & products.
The challenge
When designing the tender proposal for one of the largest EU contracts for language services, Semantix kept the big picture and purpose in mind – the implementation and enforcement of the Single Market Transparency Directive.
The content type is not only complex and demanding, the legislative process of a technical regulation also adds further complexity to the assignment. For every technical regulation to be adopted by the European member states, the full lifecycle of a document text undergoes different stages, from a draft text to multiple amended and commented versions until it becomes a final text that is adopted by the EU. Executing this contract therefore requires in-depth understanding of the scope and complexity and goes far beyond ‘just translation’. The highly technical and regulatory content calls for rigorously defined domain knowledge and accuracy. It goes without saying that the complexity increases exponentially in a multilingual scenario with potentially 506 language combinations.
Thanks to decades of experience working with global enterprises and large institutions, Semantix has access to the human resources required for these specialised fields of expertise. But there’s more to it. The sheer amount of multilingual data and formal requirements are insurmountable to securely process by humans only. The intelligent and efficient use of language technology combined with a powerful and highly specialised services organisation is the cornerstone of our solution.
A data-driven solution
For many years, Semantix has successfully partnered with ESTeam, a technology software company specialising in knowledge management and multilingual Big Data. The vision behind the successful long-term partnership is to revolutionise translation by replacing traditional processes and tools with a workflow based on automated translation and human revision. An AI-driven solution offers accuracy and consistency and allows to use all relevant datapoints and classifications to match competences and capacity. Machine learning is featured not only as a translation productivity tool, but also to ensure that the human language specialists are matched with their fields of expertise.
Data has become critical for sustained innovation. As we are digitised, we can use data to transform our own industry and the industries we are serving. The AI-driven solution of this project allows secure, accurate and intelligent processing of large amounts of multilingual data combined with human subject matter expertise for content that has real-life impact for all citizens of Europe.
Early on, Semantix acknowledged the profound changes of the latest decade within AI and machine learning and built a sound translation data strategy to scale with new ways of working. No matter the complexity of content types, content streams or workflows, Semantix can design a fit-for-purpose solution.
Britta Aagaard
Chief Business Officer – Language Solutions
