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Artificial intelligence has taken its first bite out of the Brussels bubble.
High-tech machines that can run through Eurocratic jargon at record speed have replaced hundreds of translators working for the EU, downsizing one of the largest and oldest departments among the multilingual Brussels institutions.
And this might be just the start, as new AI tools have the potential to further replace humans.
Translators are essential cogs in the complex EU machine, as every single official text must be translated in the EU’s 24 working languages before entering into force.
Until a few years ago, this herculean task was carried out by humans alone. But no longer.
Figures from the European Commission, the EU’s executive branch, indicate that its translation unit shrank by 17 percent over the last decade as it expanded its use of machine translation.
EU translation lifers feel little nostalgia for the old days, when they spent hours flipping through dusty dictionaries and typing up hefty documents.
Technology saves time, said veteran translator Markus Foti, who now heads the Commission’s machine translation division.
“The time I would spend walking to the local library … in 1999 or whatever, and looking up at the relevant paragraph to be able to type it in, can now be spent on actually translating,” Foti told POLITICO.
But translators insist that their death is greatly exaggerated. Although the job is adapting to AI, the human element remains essential, they say.
“The world is changing, and translation cannot be left behind,” said Spyridon Pilos, a former Commission official who oversaw the introduction of translation engines in 2013.
“Machine translation helps translators but cannot replace them. There is always a need for human expert validation.”
How translation went digital
As new member states joined the club in the early 2000s, ultimately increasing the number of official EU languages to 24, the EU developed more efficient tools as its translation output soared.
The Commission had to shelve its old translation system, as it was ill-equipped to work around languages of new joiners from Eastern Europe.
“That was a rule-based system where you really had to create dictionaries, grammatical rules and transformation rules. So it was very cumbersome and work-intensive,” said Dieter Rummel, the head of informatics at the Commission’s translation unit.
The workload of Commission translators went from about 2 million pages in 2013 to 2.5 million in 2022, according to a spokesperson from the EU’s executive.
A new data-driven engine was launched in 2013 — only to be replaced four years later by an even more sophisticated and better-performing translation system. That one uses an artificial neural network, or computer nodes in a structure that mimics neurons, to predict the sequence of words.
These advanced tools are good value for money, as they allow fewer staffers to translate an expanding bulk of EU legislation.
But this came at a massive cost for the translators themselves.
Permanent staffers in the Commission’s dedicated translation unit — known in Brussels jargon as DGT — dwindled from around 2,450 in 2013 to around 2,000 in 2023, according to the EU’s executive.
During this same period, mental health issues and cases of burnout rose significantly among translators according to Cristiano Sebastiani, who is the president of Renouveau et Démocratie, a trade union representing EU employees.
This was caused by an increasing workload and pressure to perform, he said.
Outsourcing increased over the last decade — up from 26 percent of DGT’s total output in 2013 to 36 percent in the first quarter of 2023 — as the Commission outsourced the ballooning workload.
The Commission’s spending on translation increased from €26.5 million in 2012 to €35.8 million in 2023 due to a surge in the outsourcing budget (from €12.6 million in 2012 to €20.4 million in 2022), according to its own figures.
“Defending multilingualism isn’t a popular battle — because it’s expensive,” Sebastiani said.
He believes the cut in translation jobs threatens to weaken the EU’s multilingualism to the benefit of the English language.
But Sheila Castilho, who chairs a translation master’s degree program at Dublin City University, points out that translators specializing in less common languages have an easier time entering the Commission, since there’s less competition around rarer tongues.
“Irish students have loads of offers from DGT all the time,” said Castilho, adding that the Commission often approaches her for referrals of students.
Life after AI
Disgruntled young translators complain that they are bearing the brunt of automation, as entry-level jobs at the Commission have become fewer despite the increased workload.
They also say that there are more people retiring than hires to replace them, and that they therefore have fewer opportunities than previous generations.
The annual number of new translator recruitments dropped from 112 in the year 2013 to 59 in 2022, according to the EU’s executive.
Aspiring EU translators have taken to social media to complain about their struggles in finding a job in the Brussels institutions.
“It seems like there never is a vacancy for translation, linguistic assistance, proofreading,” complained one aspiring EU translator posting anonymously on Facebook.
But not everything is gloomy in the EU translators’ bubble, as humans are still needed to carry out sensitive tasks.
Pilos stresses that “the translator always has the [ultimate] responsibility, and is accountable for the results” — especially when it comes to important texts.
“For those ones [urgent speeches], they still prefer people to translate from scratch especially because it’s sensitive. It cannot leak,” said Castilho.
EU translators stress that their daily routine is evolving toward spotting mistakes and adapting machine-translated texts to EU speech.
In translators’ jargon, this is known as “post editing” and is becoming an increasingly important part of the job.
“I already know that I probably won’t be translating for the rest of my life,” said a young Council translator who spoke on condition of anonymity since she is not authorized to speak to the media. She added that post editing will likely be the bulk of her work in the future.
And marketing firms outside the EU bubble are increasingly turning to so-called transcreators to repackage messages for a targeted audience.
Translators also hope that the EU’s increasing use of social media might create new opportunities.
“Most official EU accounts on social media are in English, but that might mean that not everyone feels involved,” said the Council translator.
“I wonder how that will change our profession.”
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