Get started with Digital Europe's Multilingual Services
The European Commission offers a free collection of multilingual translation and language tools that support all 24 EU languages plus a few more.
Explore the full range of tools on the Language Tools portal.
The eTranslation tool is perhaps the most useful for researchers, but there are several others, including a Speech-to-Text service. Visit their very useful help pages for video guides, step-by-step instructions and tool-specific support.
To use the eTranslation service you need to
- create an "EU login" account, and
- register your EU login account on the eTranslate service.
If you have done both steps, you should then be able to use the eTranslate service at
https://language-tools.ec.europa.eu/ETranslationServices.
Note: once logged in, you are served the "Translate documents" view by default, which works for uploaded documents. But there is also a "Translate text" view (see the blue menu bar) that works for free-text.
These services are developed through the Digital Europe programme by the Directorate-General for Translation of the European Commission.
It says that APIs are available integration into your own systems, but I could not find any more documentation regarding that.
Note that there is a usage limit, albeit high:
Individual users of eTranslation are limited to 100 document translations per day. A single document into four languages counts as four translations.
https://language-tools.ec.europa.eu/help?lang=en&app=etr
Links and notes
- https://www.nimdzi.com/etranslation-elangtech-eu-multilingual-toolset - "Assessing eLangTech: the EU’s Multilingual Toolset", 2024-10-08. This is actually a good description of the EU multilingual services, including comments and screenshots.
- https://translation.ec.europa.eu/language-data-and-ai-using-ai-break-down-language-barriers/ai-based-multilingual-services-using-eu-language-data-innovate_en - "AI-based multilingual services – using EU language data to innovate", 2026-05-28.
- https://www.gov.cy/en/research-innovation-and-digital-policy/empowering-europe-with-ai-the-european-commission-ai-based-multilingual-services-event-successfully-held 2025-03-10.
- https://translation.ec.europa.eu/dg-translations-mission_en "The Directorate-General for Translation's mission", 2026-05-06.
The Directorate-General for Translation provides the Commission with translations of written texts and other language services across the EU’s 24 official languages
https://www.brusselstimes.com/eu-affairs/2132271/eu-commission-appoints-veteran-translator-to-lead-multilingual-services
The EU Language Tools offers a plugin for some of the most popular website content management systems (CMS) to translate your whole website into multiple languages by connecting it to eTranslation.
- https://website-translation.language-tools.ec.europa.eu/index_en "Unlock global audiences with WEB-T: your free multi-language Website translation tool"
- https://website-translation.language-tools.ec.europa.eu/solutions_en - Web-T plugin offered for Wordpres, WooCommerce, Drupal, Joomla, Magento, Universal