The EU's Joint Research Centre (JRC) has published a million sentences translated into 22 official EU languages in a bid to help the development of computer-assisted translation technologies and software.
By offering free and open access to this collection of sentences, the EU hopes to foster multilingualism and provide a valuable resource for system developers to create machine translation software.
As part of its remit, the EU translates all its legal and political documents into all 23 official languages, meaning translators must work with 253 possible language pair combinations across 1.5 million pages a year. This also means there is a collection of translated texts which is of great value as a learning base for system developers....
Because the text is offered in context, it can also help develop and test grammar and spell checkers, online dictionaries and text classification systems....
Comment. This is a great example of one of the most important but least discussed virtues of OA. OA not only removes access barriers for readers and increases impact for authors, but free online texts become free online data for sophisticated software that creates new forms of value for everyone.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/21/2008 01:35:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
