Collaboration Agreement between itranslate4.eu and META-NET

The Network of Excellence “Technologies for the Multilingual European Information Society”, henceforth META-NET, and the ICT Policy Support project “Internet Translators for all European Languages”, henceforth iTranslate4, both established within Framework Programme 7, recognise the complementarity of their objectives and declare their intent for multi-level collaboration.

Scope and Objectives of the Participants

The overall aim of the iTranslate4 project is to create a better alternative to current online translation services by integrating all available service into one. Different systems produce different translations which together help the understanding of the gist of text better than the individual systems. Also different language pairs are handled in different quality by global and domestic vendors. The iTranslate4 website frees users of searching for the best one for the specific language pair by providing them all. The website incorporates the consortium partners of the iTranslate4 project, associated partners and free translators as external partners. The cooperation between these partners lead to a harmonization of the MT technology by developing a common interface and feature set. The translation systems are promoted on the website by references and additional commercial options that will provide its sustainability. The itranslate4 consortium and website is seeking for collaboration with partners engaged in any aspects of translation: MT vendors to extend the services, LSPs to be promoted, TM software companies or any web based solution that might utilize our invention by integration. We sign this agreement in belief that META-NET collaboration will help us to find these business partners meanwhile the itranslate4.eu website will strengthen META-NET community.

META-NET is a Network of Excellence dedicated to the technological foundations of the European multilingual information society. Its main goals are: to build a strategic alliance META, consisting of national and international research programmes, corporate users and commercial technology providers and language communities; to strengthen the European research community through research networking and by creating new schemes and structures for sharing resources, that is the META-SHARE infrastructure; and to build bridges by approaching open problems in collaboration with other research fields such as machine learning, social computing, cognitive systems, knowledge technologies and multimedia content. META-NET will lead to a strong language technology community with ties to other R&D communities, with a network into industry and public administration, and with visions and plans for a strategic research agenda, to support the sustainability of the European, multilingual information society.

Areas of collaboration

Both iTranslate4 and META-NET are concerned with research and applications in the area of machine translation. Via its website, iTranslate4 is creating a sustainable service for machine translation systems. In contrast, META-NET is pushing the frontiers of machine translation research, in areas like semantics and MT, hybrid MT, context and MT, and the empirical base for MT.

On the basis of this complementary relation between the two projects, the following areas of collaboration are defined:

• iTranslate4 will participate in major META-NET events and it will encourage its consortium partners to join the META alliance
• In addition to the above events, the two projects may undertake further common activities for promoting and raising awareness of machine translation technologies
• iTranslate4 will provide access to the resources developed via META-SHARE.