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Eurotra was an ambitious machine translation project established and funded by the European Commission from the late 1970s until 1994.
Emboldened by modest success with SYSTRAN, a large network of European computational linguists embarked upon the Eurotra project with the hope of creating a state-of-the-art MT system for the then seven, later nine, official languages of the European Community.
However, as time passed, expectations became tempered; "Fully Automatic High Quality Translation" was not a reasonably attainable goal.
The true character of Eurotra was eventually acknowledged to be in fact pre-competitive research rather than prototype development.
While Eurotra never delivered a "working" MT system, the project made a far-reaching long-term impact on the nascent language industries in European member states, in particular among the southern countries of Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. There is at least one commercial MT system (developed by an academic/commercial consortium in Denmark) derived from Eurotra technology.
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