Tilde wins a major contract to provide machine translation services to the Finnish government

After a thorough market analysis and evaluation of leading international providers, the Finnish Prime Minister’s Office has awarded Tilde a four-year contract to provide machine translation services to the Finnish government and its ministries.

The Prime Minister’s Office oversees and manages the entire Finnish government and provides services to government agencies and the general public. Thanks to the recently launched machine translation service AURA developed by Tilde, employees of the Finnish government will now be able to work with multilingual information more efficiently. 

As Finland is a bilingual country with growing translation needs, it was one of our top priorities to use the latest AI technologies to support our multilingual needs,” said Simo Kankkunen, a project manager from the Translation and Language Division of the Prime Minister’s Office. “Therefore, we are extremely excited to launch the AURA, which will help us to improve the flow of our information, translator productivity and all operations of the government.”

Key deciding factors for this contract were translation quality and security, and Tilde delivered exactly what the Prime Minister’s Office needed. AURA generates fast, fluent, and secure translations of documents and texts in the Finnish-Swedish, Swedish-Finnish, Finnish-English, and English-Finnish language pairs. These custom machine translation engines are based on deep machine learning algorithms and include integration of dynamic terminology to take into consideration the unique terminology and linguistic requirements. 

It is also as important that Tilde’s machine translation complies with strict security requirements and ensures data privacy and confidentiality pursuant to the GDPR.

Besides supporting a team of 70 in-house translators and terminologists at the Prime Minister’s Office, AURA will also be available to all government officials increasing the total number of potential users to 6,000. This machine translation tool will help the translators of the Office of Finnish Prime Minister to improve productively and shorten translation processes. Meanwhile, employees of public bodies will be able to quickly translate a wide variety of documents in PDF and other formats on a private cloud-based translation platform.

Finland is a great example of an innovative government, which takes advantage of language technologies to improve government operations,” claims Arturs Vasilevskis, the head of Machine Translation at Tilde. “Finnish is a morphologically rich and challenging language for machine learning; therefore, we are very proud that our team of researchers and engineers has developed this high-quality translation solution.”

Tilde has rich experience in cooperating with the public and private sectors of Finland. Tilde developed the EU Council Presidency Translator that facilitated multilingual information exchange during the Finnish Presidency in 2019. During the six months of the Presidency, more than 12.7 million words were translated with this solution. Tilde’s machine translation solutions have also boosted multilingual communication and translation efficiency at the Statistics Finland, the city of Espoo, the city of Raseborg and numerous other bodies and companies.