An online initiative that will enable public service media to transcend language barriers and offer their audiences trusted news content produced by counterparts from across Europe has been announced by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU).
The project leverages the EuroVOX open toolkit for translation and the PEACH suite of recommendations tools — systems that are collaboratively developed by EBU Members and the EBU Department of Technology and Innovation.
The new service allows public service media to offer content originating in other languages in order to provide a pan-European perspective on issues of key interest to national audiences such as the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change and migration.
Director of Technology and Innovation at the EBU, Antonio Arcidiacono (pictured) said the initiative would also act as an effective counterbalance to disinformation and divisive rhetoric propagated via social media platforms.
“Good technical innovation not only offers concrete solutions to practical problems. We strongly believe that technology should help to empower people, and that it should help us as individuals to constructively participate in the world,” Mr Arcidiacono said.
“That is what this project does,” he said.
Mr Arcidiacono said under the initiative, participating broadcasters would contribute high-quality news content to a digital hub where it would be automatically translated into multiple languages using new tools and workflows.
Editors would then select the items that were most relevant to their audiences and publish them through a recommendation box featured on their website.
Following a successful pilot phase which saw 14 broadcasters share more than 120,000 articles over a period of eight months, the project has been awarded a European Union grant which is to enable the technical tools to be fully developed.
Currently involved are public service media from Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Switzerland.
It is anticipated that more broadcasters will sign up to the service as the initiative gains momentum, adding new languages to the overall content offer.
Grant-Saconnex, 29 January 2021
