COMPANY NEWS · MACHINE TRANSLATION

European Commission Awards Machine Translation Post-Editing Contract to Pangeanic

Originally published: 30 May 2007. Updated: 28 October 2026.

Historical announcement: this article describes a contract announced in 2007. The final section adds subsequent developments documented by official EU sources.

Pangeanic announced in May 2007 that it had been awarded a contract to provide machine translation post-editing services to the European Commission’s translation department.

According to the original announcement, the work involved reviewing and correcting documents translated by Systran software hosted on the Commission’s servers. The contract combined automated translation with professional linguistic review.

Combining machine translation with human expertise

Post-editing involves checking machine-translated text against its source and correcting errors in meaning, terminology, grammar and style.

For Pangeanic, the contract represented an early step in applying this workflow to institutional documentation. The company was already using third-party machine translation tools alongside human editing and proofreading.

Catherine Dauby, Pangeanic’s Production Director at the time, described the contract as an opportunity to demonstrate the team’s experience with emerging translation technologies. She highlighted the company’s work with recurring documentation and controlled language, where consistent terminology and predictable sentence structures could support automated translation.

An early step towards proprietary translation technology

The original announcement also outlined Pangeanic’s ambition to develop its own machine translation technology through research with universities.

The objective was to help clients translate large volumes of content more quickly, while retaining human expertise where quality requirements demanded it.

Viewed historically, the announcement captures an early stage in Pangeanic’s transition from using external translation software towards developing language technology of its own.

Subsequent developments: EU-documented research and technology

Later official EU records document Pangeanic’s participation in European translation research and infrastructure projects.

The European Commission’s CORDIS record for EXPERT, which ran from 2012 to 2016, lists PANGEANIC B I EUROPA SLU as a participant. The project focused on improving data-driven translation technologies and training researchers.

A separate European Commission case study on iADAATPA, subsequently called MT-Hub, describes Pangeanic’s role in developing a platform that routes content between translation engines according to language and subject area. The platform integrated the Commission’s eTranslation and eDelivery building blocks.

These later projects document the continuation of Pangeanic’s work in machine translation research and multilingual public-sector technology.