Published on EU Science Hub (https://ec.europa.eu/jrc) Home > Language Technology Resources > DGT Translation Memory DGT-Translation Memory Introduction DGT's Translation Memory Description of the Data - Pre-processing Statistics for the DGT Translation Memory Conditions for Use Difference between the DGT Translation Memory and the other resources available here Download the DGT Translation Memory How to produce bilingual extractions More details / Reference publication Acknowledgement and Contact ISLRN: 10-653-952-884-4 [1]. Introduction Since November 2007 the European Commission's Directorate-General for Translation has made its multilingual Translation Memory for the Acquis Communautaire [2], DGT-TM, publicly accessible in order to foster the European Commission’s general effort to support multilingualism, language diversity and the re-use of Commission information. This page, which is meant for technical users, provides a description of this unique linguistic resource as well as instructions on where to download it and how to produce bilingual aligned corpora for any of the 276 language pairs or 552 language pair directions. Here is an example of one sentence translated into 22 languages [3]. view details The Acquis Communautaire is the entire body of European legislation, comprising all the treaties, regulations and directives adopted by the European Union (EU). Since each new country joining the EU is required to accept the whole Acquis Communautaire, this body of legislation has been translated into 24 official languages. As a result, the Acquis now exists as parallel texts in the following 24 languages: Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, German, Greek, Finnish, French, Irish, Hungarian, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish and Swedish. For Irish, there is very little data since the Acquis is not translated on a regular basis. There is also less Croatian data because Croatia only joined the EU in 2013. Parallel texts are texts and their manually produced translations. They are also referred to as bi- texts. A translation memory is a collection of small text segments and their translations (referred to as translation units, TU). These TUs can be sentences or parts of sentences. Translation memories are used to support translators by ensuring that pieces of text that have already been translated do not need to be translated again. Both translation memories and parallel texts are important linguistic resources that can be used for a variety of purposes, including: training automatic systems for statistical machine translation (SMT); producing monolingual or multilingual lexical and semantic resources such as dictionaries and ontologies; training and testing multilingual information extraction software; checking translation consistency automatically; testing and benchmarking alignment software (for sentences, words, etc.). The value of a parallel corpus grows with its size and with the number of languages for which translations exist. While parallel corpora for some languages are abundant, there are few or no parallel corpora for most language pairs. To our knowledge, the Acquis Communautaire is the biggest parallel corpus in existence, taking into consideration both its size and the number of languages covered. The most outstanding advantage of the Acquis Communautaire - apart from it being freely available - is the number of rare language pairs (e.g. Maltese-Estonian, Slovenian- Finnish, etc.). The first version of DGT-TM was released in 2007 and included documents published up to the year 2006. In April 2012, DGT-TM-2011 was released, which contains data from 2007 until 2010. Since then, data is released annually (e.g. 2011 data is released in 2012 with the name of DGT-TM-2012). While the alignments between TUs and their translations were verified manually for DGT-TM-2007, the TUs since DGT-TM-2011 were aligned automatically. The data format is the same for all releases. DGT's Translation Memory This extraction of aligned sentences can be used to produce a parallel multilingual corpus of the European Union’s legislative documents (Acquis Communautaire) in 24 EU languages. The aligned translation units have been provided by the Directorate-General for Translation of the European Commission by extraction from one of its large shared translation memories in EURAMIS (European advanced multilingual information system). This memory contains most, although not all, of the documents which make up the Acquis Communautaire, as well as some other documents which are not part of the Acquis. view details In order to reduce the size, the extraction uses English as the source language. The sequence in the extracted files is not necessarily the same as in the underlying documents, and redundancies of text segments like "Article 1" are inevitable. The documents are in the widely used Translation Memory eXchange (TMX) format [4]. In order to be backwards compatible, the header mentions TMX format 1.1, but the files are also compliant with TMX 1.4b [4]. The texts are encoded in UTF-16 Little Endian. The source language of the documents and sentences is not known, but many of the documents were originally written in English and then translated into the other languages. Description of the Data - Pre-processing Before the documents were aligned, the source material was pre-processed to reduce the number of entries of low value for the translators (short sentences, long sentences, obvious mismatches, etc.) ( further details [5]). This means that the contents of the documents might have changed. The documents were aligned in accordance with the segmentation rules used in the Directorate-General for Translation of the European Commission. The extraction keeps only the EUR-Lex document number (NumDoc) from which other information (e.g. year and document type) can be derived. For further information on the Numdoc structure, see the information provided by EUR-Lex [6]. The corpus is also available as a parsebank, i.e. it has been automatically annotated for part-of- speech, morphosyntax, lemma, and dependency annotations with UD-PIPE [7]. The DGT-UD parsebank can be downloaded from the CLARIN.SI repository under http://hdl.handle.net/11356/1197 [8], where you also find links to this corpus installed under two concordancers. Statistics for the DGT Translation Memory The DGT Translation Memory is currently available in 24 languages. For statistics on the total number of translation units, words and characters available for each language, you can download the file DGT-TM_Statistics.pdf [9] . For the number of aligned translation units for each language pair and further statistics regarding the release DGT-TM-2011, see the DGT-TM reference publication [10]. For the later releases, statistics files are included in the first zip file of each release. Conditions for Use I. Intellectual property and conditions of use of databases The DGT-TM database is the exclusive property of the European Commission. The Commission cedes its non-exclusive rights free of charge and world-wide for the entire duration of the protection of those rights to the re-user, for all kinds of use which comply with the conditions laid down in the Commission Decision of 12 December 2011 on the re-use of Commission documents, published in Official Journal of the European Union L330 of 14 December 2011, pages 39 to 42. Any re-use of the database or of the structured elements contained in it is required to be identified by the re-user, who is under an obligation to state the source of the documents used: the website address, the date of the latest update and the fact that the European Commission retains ownership of the data. II. Conditions for use of software The DGT-TM database is distributed with the software necessary for its exploitation/extraction. Use of such software must be carried out in accordance with the conditions laid down in the EUPL licence. III. Responsibility The database and the accompanying software are made available, without any guarantee, explicit or tacit. The Commission cannot be held responsible for any loss, injury or damage the re-user may suffer due to the re-use. The Commission does not however guarantee the absence of any irregularities which may be present in the databases, within the structured data they contain or the software itself. The Commission does not guarantee the on-going distribution of said databases and software. The Commission cannot be held responsible for any loss, injury or damage caused to third parties as a result of the re-use. The re-user shall bear sole responsibility for the re-use of the data collection, the structured elements it contains and the software. Re-use must not mislead third parties in respect of the contents of the database and the structured elements it contains, it’s the source of the contents or the date of the last update thereto. This disclaimer is not intended to limit the liability of the Commission in violation of any requirements laid down in applicable national law or to exclude its liability in cases where this is not permitted by the applicable law. IV. Definitions Definitions of terms used by the Commission Decision of 12 December 2011 on the re-use of Commission documents, published in Official Journal of the European Union L330 of 14 December 2011, pages 39 to 42, are supplemented by the following definitions: Re-user: Any natural or legal person who re-uses the documents, in accordance with the conditions laid down in the Commission Decision of 12 December 2011 on the re-use of Commission documents, published in Official Journal of the European Union L330 of 14 December 2011, pages 39 to 42. Databases: A collection of independent works, data or other materials arranged in a systematic or methodical way and individually accessible by electronic means or in any other way. Difference between the DGT Translation Memory and the other resources available here Some of the multilingual parallel resources available via the JRC's Language Technology resources page are clearly distinct, but others are similar or they overlap.