5 European Countries Have Already Launched Their National Language Technology Platforms

Croatia, Estonia, Iceland, Latvia, and Malta are the first European countries to launch their own AI-powered National Language Technology Platform (NLTP). NLTP is an open-source, fully customisable platform equipped with the newest language tools, providing the public sector and society with a secure and versatile workspace for all translation and multilingual communication operations.

Through various integrations and matching of the existing AI-based language solutions, the public sector can have all the necessary tools available on one platform. For example, it’s possible to upgrade the NLTP platform so that institutions can build intelligent chatbots for streamlining their support operations and answering citizens’ questions instantly, and even simultaneously across multiple languages. Institutions can also use the anonymisation tool to eliminate sensitive information such as personal data in documents. Voice technologies (speech recognition or synthesis) can be integrated into the NLTP platform as powerful tools to ensure service accessibility. The website translation plugin can make existing pages multilingual in just a few seconds, ensuring that public services are inclusive and accessible for foreign people, investors, businesses, and tourists, which is important for economic growth. 

Our platform “traduzzjoni.mt” combines data from the Maltese public administration, including the Laws of Malta, to ensure more refined translation results and access to specialised translation memories in various fields, which is especially important for small languages such as Maltese. While this is the first version of the platform, the following updates will bring even more benefits to our public administration, such as a terminology database, voice technologies, etc.

Donatienne Spiteri
Lawyer at the Office of the State Advocate in Malta

The first part of deploying NLTP in the 5 mentioned countries was the machine translation platform. The machine translation systems within the platform are tailored for the specifics of the national language and public sector terminology. In this way, NLTP ensures high-quality translations compared to publicly available generic translation tools. Additionally, the platform has access to the machine translation service eTranslation provided by the European Commission, which enables translation to and from all 24 official European languages. Thus, NLTP not only serves public institutions, but is also available to everyone for free.

Security is among the most important challenges when using MT for public service needs. The security bar is very low for international and freely available machine translation tools, and all translated content can be kept in foreign servers. NLTP ensures safety as the platform is owned by the local government and placed on local servers, ensuring that no translated sensitive information or confidential documents can be leaked. 

We have seen how NLTP helps to increase the efficiency of government’s internal operations such as document translation, communication with citizens, content creation, and others. NLTP also plays a huge role in the automation of processes and employees’ workload, whilst ensuring high security standards and accessibility. The usage of this platform is nearly unlimited. When launched, NLTP can be extended with Large Language Models (publicly known as ChatGPT), adjusted to meet security and accuracy needs.

Artūrs Vasiļevskis
CEO of Tilde

National Language Technology Platform is a CEF-funded project developed in partnership with Tilde as well as industry, academia, and public administration and research leaders from Latvia, Estonia, Malta, Croatia, and Iceland.

NLTP is a unique solution that has been successfully deployed in 5 countries. The open-source platform can be customised and adjusted to any language and needs. 

For more information about NLTP and to book a demonstration, visit: https://www.nltp-info.eu

The article was originally published on Slator: https://slator.com/5-european-countries-have-launched-national-language-technology-platforms/