The TRANSECO project - European Dynamics

Athens, 13 March 2008: The TRANSECO project

The TRANSECO project is co-funded by EUROPEAN DYNAMICS and the GSRT (Greek: ΓΓΕΤ) under the ΠΑΒΕΤ framework. The project was implemented with the cooperation of the Greek Institute IEL (Institute for Speech Processing).

A modern translation ecosystem was designed, which offers a secure, virtual cooperation environment, customised to the needs of users handling multilingual content. The project delivered a pilot which supports translation business processes (automation, production, revision and management of translations), including the commercial interaction with the clients.

Achieved Results

The main modules offered by the pilot are:

Translator’s working environment: The pilot offers a virtual cooperation space within which all individual services can be integrated. A core set of useful services is offered to support the ecosystem. In addition, the ecosystem supports the presentation and manipulation of XLIFF and TMX documents.
Commercial support: The pilot supports the communication and the interaction of a translation agency with its clients, by offering services for exchanging information and carrying out online cost estimation of the assignments. Among others, the module offers services for the storage and exchange of documents with the following characteristics:
procedures for achieving a fixed quality.
Special commitments, additional rules, etc. agreed between the agency and the client.
Members interaction and workflow management: The pilot authenticates and assigns a role to every member of the ecosystem (translator, reviewer, etc.) responsible for specific translation tasks:
Management of documents that concern the commercial activity and the quality assurance system as well as the translation itself together with complementary vocabulary information.
An access control management system controls the permissions of users, groups and roles as regards operations on administrative and working documents as well as system operations.
Workflow management for e-commerce transactions, which are used to handle the life-cycle of a translation order from its acceptance by the ecosystem, through the translation, revision and elaboration process, until the provision of the results to the client.
Task assignment to members of the project. The pending tasks of each member appear as a list in his/her “homepage”. The workflow moderator controls the quantified progress of the tasks by checking the percentage of already translated units in the XLIFF documents.
Automatic translation is supported by the pilot for files of predefined formats. The ecosystem extracts the textual information, which is then automatically translated and recompiles in the original format the document containing the translated text. The pilot allowed the ecosystem to use the Cognitron system of ILSP (www.ilsp.gr) to perform the automatic translation (during the pilot phase only English to Greek and vice-versa is offered). Other translation engines could be plugged to extend the translation capabilities. They will be considered in the context of the exploitation (post ΠΑΒΕΤ phase) of the project. The main advantage provided by the pilot is the significant reduction of the translation time plus the automated recompilation of the translated document in the format of the original.

The system has passed successfully a pilot testing and evaluation phase and the team is now preparing an exploitation and business plan. Two possibilities will be examined. The first is to turn it to a real product through a new investment which will allow a positioning in the translation e-marketplace. The second is to benefit from the concepts and overall experience acquired from TRANSECO and target their further elaboration and integration in other platforms addressing a wide spectrum of services and needs in a multilingual market and society.

Communication: Konstantinos.Lykourgiotis@eurodyn.com