No need for ChatGPT anymore to translate or summarize a text: the European Commission offers its own AI services

The European Commission is a central institution with a legislative role: it proposes and implements EU policies. Its particularity lies in bringing together members from diverse languages and cultures. Hence the need for powerful digital tools to facilitate exchanges, analyze reports...

To avoid relying on non-European services (such as ChatGPT, Gemini...) for translation work, summaries, or report generation, the Commission now offers its own solutions based on artificial intelligence. Specialized in specific tasks, they are designed for Europeans.

These services are made available to EU institutions, public administrations, universities, SMEs and other eligible third parties within the framework of the Digital Europe Programme. They take the form of web pages or APIs for machine-to-machine access. Registration is mandatory.

These are sovereign AI services, based in Europe and trained on high-quality data. Lighter than their general-purpose competitors, they are also less resource-intensive.

Once an account is created, you simply access the desired service. Each includes different parameters and file upload options: here is a closer look at three of the services offered by the European Commission.

eTranslation

This tool was trained on the historical translations performed by professionals working for the European Union.

In its approach, the tool is fairly basic: you must select the source language and the target language. Additional parameters are available to specify the domain (for example, translating case law or documents related to public health).

Regarding the security of transmitted data:

Data is processed in a secure environment and quickly deleted.

Considering the popularity of AI translation tools based outside Europe, one might think it is preferable to use a European solution. Yet such a service raises questions of ethics and sustainability:

• What place will professional translators have in the future, if the European Union itself provides an AI translation tool?

• How is this service used internally by Commission members? The question arises, particularly regarding bias and the distortion of terms used by artificial intelligence. A professional translator masters vocabulary nuances that are essential to defend ideas or precisely frame practices. AI, meanwhile, is based on probabilities and does not understand what it writes. This can result in an inaccurate translation or one that fails to capture the subtleties of the original text.

• Is the model available as open source?
• Finally, across the EU, what proportion of public institutions, companies or universities are even aware that such a system exists?

eSummary

Most of these questions also apply to other services provided by the Commission, such as eSummary, which can summarize long texts “at a glance.” Assuming that the institution uses this tool as well, how can we ensure that the summary truly reflects essential information without distortion? At a time of budget and time optimization, might we risk missing critical data by delegating these tasks to algorithms?

Multilingual Post

Another surprising tool: an AI that generates multilingual posts for X, the controversial platform owned by American billionaire Elon Musk. The service limits the number of characters and includes a button to post the generated content directly. Why encourage posting on this particular social network? Hopefully this service will remove its character limit, allowing it to be used to publish text on other platforms.

Despite these concerns, these various tools provide viable alternatives for Europeans seeking technological sovereignty, both for public administrations and private organizations. They could help regain control from American and Chinese digital giants and reduce dependence on their services in a tense geopolitical environment — especially as Donald Trump’s election is likely to reshuffle the cards in this critical domain.

References:

• Artificial intelligence at the European Commission (AI-EC)
• Tool – AI-based multilingual services
• eTranslation – Flyer

[Cover photo: European Commission]