In this post, we will touch on recent re-emphasis on quality in EU-translation, the recent CJUE promotional video featuring the translation kit and tooling, analyze if the current state of the art could still be improved, and see how Juremy contributes to quality. Enjoy!
Quality as a cornerstone of EU translation
Among all the technological changes, there is one fundamental value in EU translation which remains constant: Quality.
I had the chance to witness this commitment by the representatives of EU institutions at several thematic conferences and translation-related events in the past few years.
At the Transius conference held in Geneva this July, which is a flagship event specially focused on legal and institutional translation, Thierry Lefevre, the Director-General for Multilingualism at the CJEU emphasized the following important cornerstones of EU translation:
- Quality is paramount in legal translation for the Court of Justice.
- Technology must serve values, namely the rule of law and multilingualism.
Furthermore, next week, the annual event of the EU translation community, the Translating Europe Forum (#2025TEF) will be held in Brussels which I will also have the chance to attend.
And the central theme of this year’s edition is:
“Quality matters “.
That’s what I believe in as well.
My goal as the co-founder of Juremy is to boost EU translation quality by providing specialized tooling for translators which actually solves their real problems.
Our users can quickly access trusted information which helps them choose the right terminology based on
- Reliable
- Up-to-date
- Verified
- Traceable
- Easily accessible
- Customizable and
- Easy-to-navigate
multilingual EU reference texts.
New call for tenders launched by the Court of Justice for freelance translators
The Court of Justice of the European Union has just published a new tender for freelance translators to translate the Court’s documents, in 222 different language combinations.
In the promotional video shared by the CJEU, several tools are mentioned which help boost lawyer-linguists’ productivity, including different CAT-tools and NMT tools. According to the video, these tools “enable you to avail of different features and resources that can greatly reduce translation time” (citations from the video in italics).
The translation kit made available by the Court can “comprise targeted segments from previous translations which are centralised in the Euramis interinstitutional database, or indeed neural translations and further resources, namely termbases can be added to the project”.
These resources made available to freelance translators provide a valuable resource base indeed, and can be a starting point in the complex cognitive process of delivering accurate, consistent and domain-specific translations.
What we found, however, is that there is still room to further optimize efficiency and user experience in EU-law-specific terminology research.
On this screenshot taken from the CJEU promotional video for example, you can see a sample user interface of a CJEU project — the translation of the opinion of the advocate general in Joined Cases C-65/21 P and C-73/21 P to C-75/21 P. in the FR-EN language pair.
The indication ‘AT’ between segments means that there has been no exact or fuzzy match in the translation memory extracted from Euramis, so an NMT suggestion is displayed instead.
Let’s take a look at row #123 for example, marked in pink below.
As you can see, there is no match in the TMX, otherwise there would be an orange percentage number, indicating the fuzzy rate of the match found (as e.g. in row #128).
I tried to look up the given segment in Juremy.com as well, and what I immediately saw was an exact match from a 2020 document (T-635/18) - published 2 years prior to the translated document featured in the promotional video. With further research, I found that this document which included the exact match is one of the judgments of the General Court which is under appeal in the given case demonstrated in the video.
The difference between the NMT suggestion displayed in the target segment and the official, reviewed, prior art EUR-Lex translation is significant - as marked in the comparison below (differences in the AI-generated text marked in red).
When they find an exact or high fuzzy match which is relevant for the context, linguists or revisers can easily replace the generated NMT output with the trusted bilingual reference hit found in Juremy, and insert the original EUR-Lex link to the official document as an annotation in a comment.
This workflow improves quality, ensures accuracy and saves time for internal revisers working at the Court of Justice of the EU.
This was an example to show that you can still find exact or even fuzzy matches in the EU corpus which are not included in the provided kit, and also very quickly, with Juremy’s search functionality. This is understandable, since Juremy imports all case-law and legislative documents from Celex sectors 1-6 in EUR-Lex, providing a large coverage of resources to work with.
You can check out this specific example in the search tool by clicking on this link.
If you don’t have a Juremy account yet, you can sign up without commitments here, and launch your free trial.
It also has to be noted that Juremy can only integrate publicly available resources, thus internal documents available only for in-house access within the EU institutions are not included in the database. However, in our experience, the usability and efficiency of the tool is not limited by this fact, even less so in relation to the workflow of external freelance linguists.
Expert evaluation of translation suggestions is still essential
According to the promotional video, “you can evaluate and avail of the translation suggestions provided in the TMX segments and adjust them to your needs.”
And here is the crucial point: you will ALWAYS have to review translation suggestions from NMT tools, and adjust them to your needs - that means the essential quality standards. Furthermore, you should also check TMX matches based on context, relevance and accuracy.
But how will you do it in an efficient way?
The video refers to the rapid evolution of technological tools, and how the use of these technological advances makes the work of freelance linguists even more efficient.
I think it is equally important to provide tooling for the verification process of NMT suggestions and other bilingual resources.
As a lawyer-linguist myself, I have been translating legal documents — judgments, opinions, requests for preliminary ruling — for the CJEU for several years now, making good use of Juremy’s specialized functionality. One can of course say I am biased, but I think it is true anyway: Juremy makes my job so much easier when working for the Court of Justice.
So what can Juremy add to the workflow when you already have the resources provided by the CJEU?
- Up-to-date database of the entire EU corpus: All documents of EU legislation, case-law, international treaties, preparatory documents and others are updated on a weekly basis. It means that texts which didn’t have your target language version available at the time of creation of the kit, might now be available in Juremy.
- Fuzzy match hits from any EUR-Lex document: You will be able to find exact or fuzzy matches for any slightly rephrased text in any document in EUR-Lex (currently 325.000 multiplied by language versions), not only the segments included in the kit.
- Trusted resources to check NMT: Juremy allows linguists to compare and verify AI-based suggestions with revised EUR-Lex content quickly and efficiently.
- Domain-based ranking: With the EuroVoc domain indexing, you can rank all bilingual matches based on your selected domains for better context.
- Add favourite documents to search in: With the document preference feature, you can rank terminology hits in your reference document list higher, to use relevant terminology and citations.
- Listing all IATE terms within a sentence with domain and other metadata: compared to the term recognition feature in Trados, Juremy indicates more metadata and visualization for detected IATE terms.
- Direct link to the official EUR-Lex site of the bilingual concordance hit.
- Direct link to the IATE term entry on the official IATE website for further background information.
- Corrigendum indicator: Juremy will indicate if a corrigendum exists related to the hit document - it is important as not all corrigenda are included in consolidated versions!
- … and more quality features to come! Stay tuned!
To all linguists working for the CJEU as a freelance translator or aiming to enter the tendering process, I recommend giving Juremy’s unique features a try.
With Juremy, you can offset the lack of internal resources that are accessible for translators within EU institutions, but not for external translators.
Last but not least, it is a niche tool which has been developed by a lawyer-linguist and a software engineer with enthusiasm, to lift the burden off EU translators’ shoulders in terminology research.
Video demonstration of Juremy in action used in a Court project
You can have an in-depth overview of how Juremy can support the translation workflow for CJEU projects in our demo video here:
And for our valued user community who already have access to Juremy in their day-to-day work: thank you for trusting and supporting us! It would be greatly appreciated if you included Juremy in your tendering documentation on the list of translation technology tools which you use to provide efficiency and accuracy.
Let Juremy help you ensure the “quality and legal rigour of the texts produced by the Court of Justice, and thus strengthen the cooperation between EU institutions and freelance translators”, as also highlighted in the CJEU’s promotional video.