EUROPEAN COMMISSION DIGIT Connecting Europe Facility
Machine Translation service Version 1.2
Service Offering Description
CEF SOD Template v1.07 (May 2016)
Document Status: Status Final
Document Approver(s): Name Anabela Neves Markus Foti
Role Approve Approve
Document Reviewer(s): Name CEF PAO
Role Review
Summary of Changes: Version V1.0 V1.1
Date December 2016 June 2016
V1.2
June 2016
Created by Anabela Neves
Short Description of Changes 1st draft
Markus Foti/Anabela Neves CEF PAO
Updated and corrected
Service Offering Description – CEF eTranslation
Reviewed
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Table of Contents
APPROACH AND PURPOSE OF THE DOCUMENT ...................................................................... 4 1. INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................. 5 1.1. Purpose of the service ............................................................................................................... 5 1.2. Users .......................................................................................................................................... 6 1.3. Scope ......................................................................................................................................... 6 1.4. Benefits...................................................................................................................................... 7 2. ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES ............................................................................................ 8 2.1. eTranslation Service Provider.................................................................................................... 8 2.2. eTranslation Technical Team ..................................................................................................... 9 2.3. eTranslation Support Team ....................................................................................................... 9 2.4. eTranslation Domain Owner ................................................................................................... 10 2.5. European and national public administrations (web service users) ....................................... 10 2.6. Translators in EU institutions and in national public administrations .................................... 10 2.7. Non-translating staff in EU institutions and in national public administrations ..................... 10 3. HOW TO USE THE SERVICE STEP BY STEP .......................................................................... 11 3.1. Access to the Web Service ...................................................................................................... 11 3.1.1. Request for access ................................................................................................................ 11 3.1.2. Activation of access .............................................................................................................. 11 3.2. Access to the Web Interface ................................................................................................... 12 3.2.1. Request for access ................................................................................................................ 12 3.2.2. Activation of access .............................................................................................................. 12 4. TERMS AND CONDITIONS................................................................................................. 13 5. ANNEX ............................................................................................................................ 14 6. CONTACT INFORMATION ................................................................................................. 15
Service Offering Description – CEF eTranslation
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APPROACH AND PURPOSE OF THE DOCUMENT This document is the Service Offering Description (SOD) for the eTranslation Machine Translation service, which has evolved from MT@EC, the European Commission’s Machine Translation service. Key content includes an explanation of the roles and responsibilities and the steps to use the service. This document describes the service, which is available to the staff of EU institutions, public administrations in the EU Member States, Iceland and Norway, and cross-border EU projects (e.g. CEF DSIs). The document focuses on features and characteristics of the web interface available to individual users through the Testa-ng network and via the Internet. The service can also be integrated in online services and information systems through machine-to-machine interaction using a web service. The specifications of the web service are available upon request.
Glossary The key terms used in this Service Offering Description are defined in the CEF Definitions section on the CEF Digital Single Web Portal. The key acronyms used in this Service Offering Description are defined in the CEF Glossary on the CEF Digital Single Web Portal.
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1. INTRODUCTION eTranslation is a Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) building block. Its main goal is to help European and national public administrations exchange information across language barriers in the EU, Iceland and Norway, by providing a service that enables all Digital Service Infrastructures (DSIs) to be multilingual. Public administrations, and ultimately citizens and businesses in the EU, will thus be able to use digital services in the language they choose. While eTranslation is mainly intended to be integrated into such digital services, it also offers useful stand-alone services for the translation of documents or snippets of text.
1.1. Purpose of the service The harmonious co-existence of many languages in Europe is a powerful symbol of the EU's aspiration to be united in diversity - a cornerstone of the European project. A successful multilingualism policy can open up lifelong opportunities for citizens: it may increase their employability, facilitate access to cross-border services and protection of rights, and contribute to solidarity through enhanced intercultural dialogue and social cohesion. By providing machine translation capabilities, eTranslation is a key enabler of multilingualism and a central component of the Digital Single Market. The service provides individual users and online services with the ability to translate between any pair of EU official languages, as well as Norwegian (BokmĂĽl), either through a web interface or a web service. A list of key terminology related to the CEF eTranslation service is defined in the table below. Terminology
Definition
API
Application Programming Interface. The eTranslation API consists of a set of SOAP request messages and a definition of the structure of response messages, in Extensible Markup Language (XML) format.1
MT@EC
MT@EC is the European Commission Machine Translation service, built using the open-source statistical machine translation toolkit "Moses" and officially launched in June 2013. It is the predecessor to eTranslation.
Testa-ng
Trans European Services for Telematics between Administrations, new generation, a data communication network service.2
1
As defined in Wikipedia
2
https://ec.europa.eu/isa2/actions/strengthening-eu%E2%80%99s-telecommunications-backbone_en
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Web interface
The web page accessed via a web browser and allowing users to submit documents or snippets of text for machine translation and to download the raw machine translation output.
Web service
A software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network.3
1.2. Users The eTranslation service is intended for the following type of users:
European and national public administrations or cross-border EU projects (e.g. CEF DSIs) interested in integrating machine translation in their digital services to guarantee their services are supported in all the official languages of the EU. Translators in EU institutions and in national public administrations, to facilitate their dayto-day work. Non-translating staff in EU institutions and in national public administrations to deal with documents in languages they do not master and facilitate cross-border information exchange.
1.3. Scope As defined in section 1.1 “Purpose of the service”, the scope of the eTranslation service is to provide machine translation capabilities to individual users and online services in the EU Member States, Iceland and Norway. The eTranslation web interface will be in line with the currently available MT@EC web interface. This is available in all the EU languages, so that users may display it in their preferred language. The interface is displayed in English by default, but the preferred language can be set persistently by recording a user profile. In addition to the default language for the interface, the user profile can specify the start page, default languages for source and target language, delivery mechanism (e-mail or not), and other criteria. Translation of formatted documents and of plain text is possible from any EU official language into one or more of the other EU official languages, that is to say BG (Bulgarian), CS (Czech), DA (Danish), DE (German), EL (Greek), EN (English), ES (Spanish), ET (Estonian), FI (Finnish), FR (French), GA (Irish), HR (Croatian), HU (Hungarian), IT (Italian), LT (Lithuanian), LV (Latvian), MT (Maltese), NL (Dutch), PL (Polish), PT (Portuguese), RO (Romanian), SK (Slovak), SL (Slovenian), and SV (Swedish). NB (Norwegian Bokmål) is also available. Several documents may be translated from a single original language to many target languages in a single submission.
3
W3C definition
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When submitting documents, the user must select the source language manually. Automatic language detection is supported for the translation of text snippets for plain text at least 50 characters long. Raw machine translations are available to download through a tab on the main interface accessible only to the requesting user for a period of 24 hours following the request. They can also be received by email. The input formats currently supported are doc, docx, html, odt, pdf, ppt, pptx, rtf, txt, tmx, xliff, xls and xlsx. By default the translated document is returned in the same format except in the case of pdf where the document is returned as docx. Users may also select tmx or xliff formats. Specific domains (subject areas) of translation can be selected through the interface. The collection of domain-specific corpora and terminology resources in various domains under the European Language Resource Coordination (ELRC4) effort will allow the training of domain specific engines for the eTranslation service. The service also provides machine translation capabilities for digital services through an API. For each application connecting to through the web service, a quota is assigned for the total number of requests (where a request consists of a single language pair) that may be submitted per day. The default is 10000. System suppliers of a DSI or any other public online service which would like to give the possibility to the users of their online service to use it in their own language can Integrate the eTranslation within their system/service by connecting through the API which uses a web service to automatically request machine translations. The end users of the online service will then be able to use it in their own language.
1.4. Benefits eTranslation has been designed to generate the following benefits:
4
Increase Speed: Increasing processing speed for inbound information so that it is quickly understood without having to wait for a human translation and then route it to the right person/department.
Reduce Costs: human translations will only be needed for documents deemed important, or even of specific pages of a given document.
Improve Information Exchange: Facilitating easier information exchange within and between interest groups, judicial collaborators, and others, based on their expertise and not on the knowledge of the working language(s) of the group.
High security: eTranslation will follow standard security best practices. It is accessible either over the Testa-ng network, or over a secure https Internet connection. Both the original document and its machine translation are deleted from the system after 24 hours, or, optionally, immediately after download. Documents and text can also be returned by email.
http://www.lr-coordination.eu/home
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2. ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES This section describes the main roles in eTranslation and their responsibilities. The following table summarises the split of roles and responsibilities between the different actors in eTranslation in the form of a RACI5 matrix where:
Responsible (R): indicates the entities that perform the process-step. Every process-step has at least one responsible entity. Responsibilities can also be shared.
Accountable (A): indicates the entity that is ultimately accountable for the process-step. Every process-step has only one accountable entity.
Consulted (C): indicates the entities that give feedback or are consulted during the processstep. This is a two-way process. Not every process-step has an entity that is being consulted.
Informed (I): indicates the entities that need to be informed on the results of the processstep. This is a one-way process. Not every process-step has an entity that is being informed.
The process is described in detail in Section 3 How to use the service step by step.
Non-translating staff in EU institutions and in national public administrations
European and national public administrations (web service users)
eTranslation Domain Owner
eTranslation Support Team
Translators in EU institutions and national public administrations
Access to the Web Service Request for access Activation of access Access to the Web Interface Request for access Activation of access
eTranslation Technical Team
Entity/role
eTranslation Service Provider
Process/ Service
RA
RA
I
I
RA CR
CR
RA
CR
I
RA
2.1. eTranslation Service Provider Role: provider of the Machine Translation service6 Responsibilities:
5
RACI: R = Responsible; A = Accountable; C = Consulted, I = Informed
6
The provider of the Machine Translation service is DG Translation (DGT)
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Availability of the service: the service is available 24 hours a day/7 days a week (subject to the availability of the underlying IT infrastructure) unless essential maintenance is needed. When maintenance is scheduled (for example for the deployment of a new version) the maintenance period is announced beforehand to the affected applications and local helpdesks in EU institutions.
Quality of the service: eTranslation uses statistical machine translation technology based on Moses (http://www.statmt.org/moses/) and neural machine translation engines, depending on the language pair chosen. Within that context the translation quality depends on three main factors:
the languages being translated from and into (the more grammatically complex the languages, particularly the output language, the poorer the result);
the style of language (the closer the language and topic are to EU official style, the better the output; very long and very short sentences can be hard to handle; conversational or literary language is a weak point);
the subject matter (if the domain and terminology are not known by the system, i.e. not included in previously translated EC documents, some terms may not be translated). DGT is constantly working to improve translation quality. The web interface provides a three level indicator of translation quality expected in the form of medals: gold (G) for "best available", silver (S) for "good for understanding" and bronze (B) for "just a rough idea".
Capacity of the service: in respect of response times and the number of parallel requests, provided users are within their quota and the request is well-formed, eTranslation guarantees the following response times: ≥ 95% documents returned within one hour and ≥ 95% of text snippet <= 4000 characters returned within one minute.
Reliability of the service: for documents and text snippets, ≥ 95% well-formed requests pass through the system without problem (no fail silent, no crash).
Deployment of the service: the service is frequently updated with software and linguistic enhancements. These updates are carried out, to the greatest extent possible, outside core working hours.
2.2. eTranslation Technical Team Role: Technical support Responsibilities:
Maintenance and updating of software
Failure analysis
Monitoring of the web interface
Provision and monitoring of API usage
Technical improvements
2.3. eTranslation Support Team Role: Service Desk support Service Offering Description – CEF eTranslation
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Responsibilities:
Onboarding of new users
Troubleshooting
Transmission of tickets to the machine translation technical team
Providing support and information to users on the use of the service in general
2.4. eTranslation Domain Owner Role: Policy Domain7 Responsibilities:
Providing support to users on policy-related matters
2.5. European and national public administrations (web service users) Role: users of eTranslation Responsibilities:
follow the needed and recommended steps to use the API
make responsible use of the system regarding security and quantity of translations
2.6. Translators in EU institutions and in national public administrations Role: users of eTranslation Responsibilities:
respect security guidelines in submitting documents for translation
2.7. Non-translating staff in EU institutions and in national public administrations Role: users of eTranslation Responsibilities:
7
respect security guidelines in submitting documents for translation
The Policy Domain Owner is DG Communication Networks, Content and Technology (DG CNECT)
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3. HOW TO USE THE SERVICE STEP BY STEP MT@EC, eTranslation’s precursor, is available as a web interface accessible to individual users through the following urls: https://mtatec.ec.testa.eu/mtatec (users on the Testa-ng network) and https://webgate.ec.europa.eu/mtatec (users on the Internet). The service can also be integrated in online services and information systems through machine-tomachine interaction using a web service. The specifications of the web service are available upon request. eTranslation will offer the two approaches either through a web interface (available from November 2017) or through machine-to-machine interaction.
3.1. Access to the Web Service The service provides machine translation capabilities for digital services (machine-to-machine) through an Application Programming Interface (API). 3.1.1. Request for access
Purpose: Reception and evaluation of requests for access to the API. Actors:
European and national public administrations (web service users)
eTranslation technical team
Process: 1. The requester (European and national public administrations) sends a request for access to CEF-AT@ec.europa.eu 2. Reception of request for information and/or access by email by the eTranslation technical team 3. Analysis of status of request by the eTranslation technical team 4. Transmission of API documentation by the eTranslation technical team 3.1.2. Activation of access
Purpose: Activate the machine-to-machine connection. Actors:
eTranslation technical team
Process: 1. Activation of machine-to-machine connection 2. Requesters are informed Service Offering Description – CEF eTranslation
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3.2. Access to the Web Interface Officials working in a EU institution or public administration in a EU country, Norway and Iceland can use the web interface as a stand-alone service for the translation of documents or snippets of text. 3.2.1. Request for access
Purpose: Reception of individual requests for access. Prerequisite: Users need a password to use the service. EU officials can use eTranslation with their EU Login (formerly ECAS) credentials. Staff working for a public administration in an EU country, Iceland or Norway should create an EU login as indicated in step 1 of the process. Actors:
Translators in EU institutions and in national public administrations and/or nontranslating staff in EU institutions and in national public administrations
eTranslation support team
Process: 1. Sign up for a personal EU Login account and password (using only your professional email address). 2. Email DGT-MT@ec.europa.eu to tell the support team you have an EU Login account. State what your job involves and which public administration body you work for. Include your full e-mail signature with your position, employer and contact details. 3. The support team creates the account and notifies you that you can start using the service. Individual accesses will be automatically deactivated after 12 months if not used. 3.2.2. Activation of access
Purpose: Evaluate the status of individual requests for access. Actors:
eTranslation support team
Process:
Analysis of status of requester (public administration domain)
Activation of individual users/internet domain
Requesters are informed
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4. TERMS AND CONDITIONS The general terms and conditions of CEF Building Blocks can be consulted in the Master Service Arrangement, available on the CEF Digital Single Web Portal: https://ec.europa.eu/cefdigital/wiki/display/CEFDIGITAL/Master+Service+Arrangement The terms and conditions specific to the Machine Translation service are described in the table below. Term / Condition
Description
Availability of the Machine Translation service
The machine translation service is available 24 hours a day/7 days a week (subject to the availability of the underlying IT infrastructure) unless essential maintenance is needed. When maintenance is scheduled (for example for the deployment of a new version) the maintenance period is announced beforehand to the affected applications and local helpdesks in EU institutions.
Limitation of liability
The output provided by eTranslation is raw machine translation intended to facilitate understanding of foreign language texts. The European Commission makes no claims as to its accuracy or stylistic quality and accepts no liability for possible errors. Any texts intended for publication or where accuracy is paramount should be edited by human translators. Documents produced by this system contain no indication that they were machine translated.
Service Offering Description â&#x20AC;&#x201C; CEF eTranslation
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5. ANNEX Not applicable.
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6. CONTACT INFORMATION Machine Translation Support Team By email: DGT-MT@ec.europa.eu for questions concerning access to and usage of MT@EC CEF-AT@ec.europa.eu for questions concerning access to and usage of eTranslation and API and policy-related matters
Standard Service: from 0830 – 1730 CET on Commission working days
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