RWS Wins Deal to Provide European Parliament with Live Translation & Transcription Service

All parliamentary sessions will be made available across all 24 European languages.

RWS, the world’s leading provider of technology-enabled language, content management and intellectual property services, together with a consortium of partners, has won a highly competitive tender to provide real-time, AI-powered transcription and translation services to the European Parliament.

The solution, designed by CEDAT85, will automatically transcribe and translate all parliamentary debates into the 24 official European languages used by the institution. Parliamentary members – including those with hearing impairments – will now be able to follow debates and discussions in real-time on-screen. Transcriptions will also be made available online.

“Winning such a competitive tender is a fantastic result and testament to the team’s commitment,” said Thomas Labarthe, President of RWS’s Language Services and Technology division. “Our end-to-end solution sets a new innovation benchmark for public sector organizations looking to digitize their multilingual processes.”

The consortium includes RWS, CEDAT85 and Bertin IT. The combination of RWS’s machine translation solution, Language Weaver, CEDAT85’s speech-to-text voice recognition platform and Bertin IT’s expertise in voice intelligence ranked first throughout the 18 month competitive evaluation period.

“We are extremely proud of this result which is down to the hard work of our team, alongside our consortium partners, who worked day and night to overcome the significant challenges involved in such an innovative initiative,” said Enrico Giannotti, Managing Director of CEDAT85.

The consortium now aims to develop the solution concept for wider commercial use, including live translation of audio for web conferences, remote live interpretation platforms and web technical training, in an effort to reduce the dependency on human interpreters and reshape remote working.

Language Weaver is a secure, adaptable machine translation platform that processes high volumes of content. It instantly, and securely, translates content across 3,000 language combinations. CEDAT85’s speech recognition and speech-to-text technologies have been developed over the past 35 years and are used by some of the globe’s largest brands to transcribe conversations instantly for analysis and collaboration. The combination of these technologies provides one of the most powerful solutions to increase the inclusion and participation of event attendees that speak multiple languages.