Press Releases

In 2014 the European Commission launched the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) to support trans-European networks and infrastructures in the sectors of transport, telecommunications and energy with the aim to establish a Digital Single Market in the 28 EU member states, Iceland and Norway. One of CEF’s key objectives is to facilitate cross-border interaction between public administrations, businesses and citizens, by providing and supporting multiple Digital Service Infrastructures (DSIs). The DSIs are basic re-usable digital services that are crucial for the realization of a connected Europe in the areas of consumer rights, health, public procurement, social security, culture and others.

Among CEF services, eTranslation helps overcome one of the main challenges that European and national public administrations are facing today: the exchange of information across language barriers. In this context, the European Language Resource Coordination (ELRC) seeks to identify and gather language resources relevant to national public administrations and services, thus helping eTranslation to better adapt to the needs of national administrations and to enable multilingualism of public digital services.

Since 2015, Cyprus is represented in the European Language Resource Coordination action and has fully endorsed its vision and objectives. Cyprus’ public administrations, e.g. the Press and Information Office of the Ministry of Interior, have contributed monolingual and multilingual language data which are already used by the European Commission to fine-tune the eTranslation system for the Greek language. Nonetheless, more opportunities for strengthening the country and the Greek language in the European multilingual Digital Single Market lie ahead. 

This is the reason why, two years after the first round of successful workshops in 30 European countries, ELRC, on behalf of the European Commission, is back in Cyprus with a second workshop which will take place in Nicosia on 4 December 2018 at 30, Vyronos Avenue, 1096. The aim of the workshop is to discuss Cyprus’ position and prospects in a digitally connected multilingual Europe. Moreover, the ELRC workshop will seek to highlight relevant national strategies and actions for eGovernment, multilingualism and open data that can help Cyprus maximize the impact of EC initiatives. In constructive dialogue with dedicated experts from the European Commission, high-level officials from the Cypriot public administration and government, language technologists, and language service providers, experiences and needs for a modern multilingual public administration will be shared. Last but not least, sources of multilingual data that will help adapt CEF eTranslation to the needs of Cyprus’ public services will be identified, and technical and legal issues with regard to the use of data for automated translation will be addressed.

The workshop is addressed to digital public services providers, to public administration executives, officers and partners, translators and people who manage multilingual documents and data. More information is available at http://www.lr-coordination.eu/l2cyprus