The Basque Government's Deputy Ministry of Linguistic Policy organized today, 18 May, in Donostia the seminar "Machine translation in Basque". Among the speakers will be Itziar Cortés Etxabe, head of translation technologies for Elhuyar, accompanied by Gorka Labaka Intxauspe, doctor in Automatic Translation and researcher of the Ixa Group.

Ixa and Elhuyar are references in the field of machine translation and in the seminar, in addition to speaking in general about machine translation systems, they will present the research and projects carried out in systems in Basque.

Machine translation systems have changed a lot in a few years. Rules-based systems were initially created to create translations by combining different language resources. Then, the statistical systems that created statistical models from gigantic collections of texts to adapt a text from one language to another appeared. Currently, the area of machine translations is constantly evolving and we are already researching neural network-based systems.

All these research advances and is being integrated into more than one project. Itziar and Gorka will present examples of some of the machine translation systems currently used, such as the 3-year project we have been working with the Eroski Foundation for machine translation of the web consumer.es and the machine translation systems that have been taking place for years in the Ministry of Finance and Public Administrations. All the projects mentioned are examples of applied research ranging from the beginning of the design of quality systems to their application in real contexts.

The future of machine translation is present in this type of research, in applied research. That's the way: to integrate the new technologies researched into real projects and to resume research with what they learned from them. In this way, systems and resources will constantly improve.