Free, unique website offering multiple translations

London, 28 March 2012 – 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 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 iTranslat4.eu’s programmers connects the different translation systems.

The free 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.

Furthermore it will also provide translations memories such as SDL Trados Studio, MemQ or DeJa Vu for translators and translation companies.

‘Using MorphoLogic’s technology pioneered by László Tihanyi, the consortium partners pooled their expertise and resources and created an innovative web-based service that is unique in the world. High standard of translations are ensured by continuous monitoring and evaluation’ – said Tamás Váradi, project coordinator and deputy director of the Research Institute for Linguistics, HAS.

’The development of high quality machine translation systems require significant scientific and financial effort. The developer companies generally concentrate only on those languages which are financially profitable. That is the reason why we considered this initiative very important. Linking the translation systems, thus allowing translation of any language pairs and often offering different translation solutions, this is the real novelty of the development’ – summarizes László Tihanyi, the inventor and technical director of the project.

Visitors of the portal can come across with translation boxes that can be tailor made. Website owners can add the service to their own pages, since the applications that can be integrated in their own sites can translate both texts and the websites for those foreign visitors who do not speak a foreign language.

The developers of the project anticipate significant traffic for the website and they expect not only new users but also new service providers to join.