In order to develop its full potential, global communication needs linguistic support systems such as Machine Translation (MT). In the past decade, free online MT tools have become available to the general public, and the quality of their output is increasing. However, the use of such tools may entail various legal implications, especially as far as processing of personal data is concerned. This is even more evident if we take into account that their business model is largely based on providing translation in exchange for data, which can subsequently be used to improve the translation model, but also for commercial purposes. The purpose of this paper is to examine how free online MT tools fit in the European data protection framework, harmonised by the EU Data Protection Directive. The perspectives of both the user and the MT service provider are taken into account.

This article describes the development of a bidirectional shallow-transfer based machine translation system for Spanish and Aragonese, based on the Apertium platform, reusing the resources provided by other translators built for the platform. The system, and the morphological analyser built for it, are both the first resources of their kind for Aragonese. The morphological analyser has coverage of over 80\%, and is being reused to create a spelling checker for Aragonese. The translator is bidirectional: the Word Error Rate for Spanish to Aragonese is 16.83%, while Aragonese to Spanish is 11.61%.