The COVID-19 pandemic is the worst pandemic to strike the world in over a century. Crucial to stemming the tide of the SARS-CoV-2 virus is communicating to vulnerable populations the means by which they can protect themselves. To this end, the collaborators forming the Translation Initiative for COvid-19 (TICO-19) have made test and development data available to AI and MT researchers in 35 different languages in order to foster the development of tools and resources for improving access to information about COVID-19 in these languages. In addition to 9 high-resourced, ”pivot” languages, the team is targeting 26 lesser resourced languages, in particular languages of Africa, South Asia and South-East Asia, whose populations may be the most vulnerable to the spread of the virus. The same data is translated into all of the languages represented, meaning that testing or development can be done for any pairing of languages in the set. Further, the team is converting the test and development data into translation memories (TMXs) that can be used by localizers from and to any of the languages.

We describe the CEF Data Marketplace project, which focuses on the development of a trading platform of translation data for language professionals: translators, machine translation (MT) developers, language service providers (LSPs), translation buyers and government bodies. The CEF Data Marketplace platform will be designed and built to manage and trade data for all languages and domains. This project will open a continuous and longterm supply of language data for MT and other machine learning applications.

This paper addresses the problem of reliably measuring productivity gains by professional translators working with a machine translation enhanced computer assisted translation tool. In particular, we report on a field test we carried out with a commercial CAT tool in which translation memory matches were supplemented with suggestions from a commercial machine translation engine. The field test was conducted with 12 professional translators working on real translation projects. Productivity of translators were measured with two indicators, post-editing speed and post-editing effort, on two translation directions, English–Italian and English–German, and two linguistic domains, legal and information technology. Besides a detailed statistical analysis of the experimental results, we also discuss issues encountered in running the test.