Efficiency-enhancing measures
Lawyer-linguists and interpreters rely on increasingly sophisticated multilingualism support tools. While neural machine translation has become indispensable, it must be carefully monitored, especially when it comes to texts that produce legal effects.
The Court’s interpretation and legal translation services benefit from multilingual terminological work carried out in collaboration with a specialised unit, assisting with the quality and consistency of translations and oral submissions. This unit also ensures the terminological and documentary preprocessing of some of the documents. The terminological collections and databases are constantly improved so that the solutions found can be reused for the benefit of all, in particular through IATE, the terminological database common to all the EU institutions, which is largely public.
For full-text multilingual legal research, the first port of call for lawyer-linguists and interpreters is EUR-Lex, which provides access to EU law. That site enables users to consult legislation and case-law using the bilingual or trilingual display function. They also make use of tools developed for the Court’s own needs (for example the EURêka case-based search engine or the website of the Court of Justice of the European Union), or of interinstitutional resources, such as the linguistic meta-search engine Quest or the Euramis translation memory system.
In addition to these traditional tools, which themselves have advanced technologically, a number of new tools specific to the linguistic field are now essential. These include, in particular, translation editors. Trados Studio, a market tool, was awarded the last two inter-institutional public contracts. This editor’s working environment displays the source and target text simultaneously, so that sentences which have already been translated, which are still to be translated, which are in the process of being translated or for which there are ‘machine’ translation suggestions are shown side by side. The alignment of the language versions makes it possible, after translation, to populate the Euramis inter-institutional database. Within Trados Studio, lawyer-linguists can activate other translation support tools, including the aforementioned terminological tools.
For several years, neural machine translation, stemming from Deep Learning, a type of artificial intelligence, has also been helpful. At the Court of Justice, the computer-assisted translation environment integrates the neural engines eTranslation, a system created and managed by the EU institutions, and a market tool called DeepL Pro. These neural engines are trained on huge corpora of aligned bilingual segments, from which they ‘learn’. Once trained, these engines provide translations using algorithms that assign weighting to the matches found, based on probabilistic, grammatical, contextual and other approaches.
Despite the considerable contribution of these tools and technologies, we must not forget that humans, at the heart of this ‘enhanced’ environment, are the only ones with the judgment necessary to verify the solutions proposed and the essential linguistic and legal expertise.
Continuing professional development is fundamental to maintaining and expanding the professional skills required to perform the tasks specific to the various multilingual professions. It is an integral part of the department’s policy aimed at guaranteeing a very high level of quality in its translation and interpreting services and mainly concerns the linguistic, legal and technical fields.
The development of skills in these areas begins when staff take up their duties. New staff complete a training programme, the objective of which is to familiarise them with the tools and work environment of the service. It continues throughout the career with a significant investment in language training, in order to maintain and extend the language coverage of interpreters and lawyer-linguists in particular. This investment also aims to enrich the legal component of multilingual professions through the regular organisation of conferences and seminars relating to a specific area of EU law or national law. Finally, and in line with changes in the technical environment of the service, major training plans exist to support IT migrations or the use of new work tools.
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