Education and Science, Estonia

Reps told reporters that the state supports a leap in the development of language technology and the coronavirus crisis confirmed the need for it. 

The machine translation software to be available by the end of next year enables to quickly translate text on websites, various documents, and large amounts of text.

The versions of the software will include Estonian-English-Estonian, Estonian-Russian-Estonian, and Estonian-German-Estonian. Speech technology enabling to write down and translate spoken language will be added to the machine translation software.

The language technology also is aimed at helping smart devices support the Estonian language, spokespeople for the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research said.

In addition, the availability of information relayed in the Estonian language will be improved for Estonia's 90,000 hearing-impaired persons and 1,500 deaf persons. By next fall, the feature of automatically adding subtitles to live and pre-recorded broadcasts of various television channels will be ready.