Automated Romansh translation now available for the first time

AI text translation for the national languages of German, Italian and French is widespread in Switzerland. But now, for the first time, automated translation from and into Romansh is also available. This has been made possible by a collaboration between the Swiss companies Radiotelevisiun Svizra Rumantscha (RTR) and Textshuttle.

Disclaimer: This article was written in 2022 and describes the situation before Textshuttle’s merger with Supertext and the subsequent relaunch at supertext.com.

Machine translation is a common tool in everyday life for most people in Switzerland who speak German, Italian or French. Now, for the first time, it is also possible to use a machine translation system for Romansh texts. On behalf of and in collaboration with the Romansh media company RTR, Textshuttle has developed an automated text translation system for the Romansh language.

The Zurich-based company and RTR are using state-of-the-art technologies and existing language resources to develop the translation solution and thus to actively contribute to the preservation of this Swiss national language. During an initial test phase in the spring of 2021, the two companies worked intensely on translation from Romansh to German, producing a system able to recognise Romansh idioms. After this first successful collaboration, Textshuttle and RTR started working on the opposite translation direction, from German to Romansh, in the summer of 2021. This project phase was completed in the spring of 2022. If Romansh is selected as the target language in this system, the text is translated into Rumantsch Grischun, the official written form of the language. However, it is conceivable that individual dialects may also be taken into account in future projects.

The translation is created using neural networks (artificial intelligence). During a training session that lasts several weeks, the language model “learns” the translation mechanisms based on existing translation data. The development is driven by iterative processes, which are continuously adapted and improved using the latest technologies. Native speakers support this process by evaluating the translations and providing feedback and improvements.

The challenge with Romansh is that there are very few existing language resources compared to more widely used languages. The development process involves processing, aligning and cleaning existing data before it can be used for training. A total of 250,000 parallel segments have been used so far. These originate from existing, freely available data such as legal and press texts from the canton of Graubünden. Furthermore, existing data from RTR is incorporated into the training sessions and prioritised. This means that the system is specialised in RTR’s own style and terminology.

The first results are promising and have been perceived as helpful in everyday practice by language experts. Automated translation can be conveniently used for single words, full texts or Word documents in the web interface, and works similarly to freely available online translation services. In the future, RTR will use machine translation to facilitate editorial work by having texts pretranslated using automated translation. The texts will then only need to be reviewed and lightly edited.

In the future, it is possible that the Romansh translator will be offered as an online service in order to provide the whole Swiss population with access to the Romansh language.

For those who want to get to know the Romansh language better after this great news, Textshuttle’s services can be used free of charge.

About Textshuttle

Textshuttle is an independent provider of machine translation solutions focusing on data security and corporate wording. Founded as a spin-off of the University of Zurich, the company has close ties with leading research institutions and currently employs 17 experts in machine learning and translation technology. Textshuttle’s AI-based translation software is used by thousands of employees and dozens of professional translation teams in Swiss and multinational corporations such as SwissLife, Migros Bank and the OBI Group.

‍About RTR

Radiotelevisiun Svizra Rumantscha (RTR) is a subsidiary of the Swiss media company SRG SSR. RTR, headquartered in Chur, is the only company to fulfil the audiovisual public service mandate for the “Svizra rumantscha”, or Romansh-speaking Switzerland.

Beyond the actual Romansh language area, the company sees itself as “acting as a bridge in the linguistically diverse canton of Graubünden and for Romansh-speaking people in the diaspora throughout Switzerland and beyond the national border”. More information is available at rtr.ch.

Last year, RTR launched a project with the company Recapp for the written reproduction of spoken Romansh. As a result of this project, all Romansh dialects can now be recognised by speech recognition.