The European Commission has made available for public use of a translation memory containing one million sentences and their high quality translations in 22 languages.

The sentences or sentence fragments are from European Union (EU) legal texts. It is possible to find their equivalent sentences in all other official languages, with Irish as an exception.

The data are useful for the development of machine translation systems and other linguistic software tools such as grammar and spelling checkers, online dictionaries and multilingual text classification systems.

"By this initiative the European Commission intends to boost human language technologies, support multilingualism and make computer-assisted translation easier, cheaper and more accessible," said Leonard Orban, EU Commissioner for Multilingualism, Friday.

"This unique collection of language data contributes to the creation of a new generation of software tools for human language processing and helps foster the competitiveness of the language industry," said Janez Potocnik, the European Research Commissioner.

The EU institutions have more multilingual texts than any other organizations because of the requirements that EU law exist in each of its 23 official languages.

(Xinhua News Agency January 18, 2008)