A group of European universities and private companies has received over $3 million US to put a translation tool online.

The European Union gave the consortium 2.3 million Euros for the project, Dubbed MOLTO (Multi-Lingual Online Translation), which has an overall budget of 3.5 million Euros, or $3.5 million US.

The project is spearheaded by the University of Gothenburg, in Sweden, though the University of Helsinki, Finland, and the Polytechnic University of Catalonia in Barcelona, Spain, are also involved.

"The current tools out there, such as Google Translator, do not give good quality translations. They are okay for browsing and to get an idea of what is in a text but most people would not use them to translate something important," Aarne Ranta of Gothenburg University told the English-language Swedish news website The Local.

"The EU grant allows us to develop technology we are already working with into a translation tool for the internet. The plan is that producers of web pages should be able to freely download the tool and translate texts into several languages simultaneously."

Unlike competitors such as the recently launched Google Translate, MOLTO will only translate documents that conform to specific domains. Initially, for example, it will translate biomedical patents, mathematical exercises and museum object descriptions.

It will target the producers of information, rather than consumers.

According to the FAQs section of its website, there is "a price to pay" for being "too good to be true."

"We can only translate things that we have customized the system to translate." Where Systran and Google are designed to cover as many types of document as possible, "MOLTO opts for precision."

The prototype system is due to go live in June 2010. Twelve European Union languages, including Bulgarian, Dutch, French and Spanish, will be represented, though more may eventually be added.

17 January 2010