Celebrating European Translation Technology

The Brains and the Guts of Localization and Globalization will assemble in Rome on June 3-5, 2026 to discuss how translation technology and AI will turn multilinguality into a powerful driver for trust and growth in international business.

Europe is one of the largest economies in the world, known for its cultural diversity and multilinguality. More than 250 different languages are spoken by the 450 million people living in the 27 countries of the European Union. This is a place where translation technology thrives. You would think so…. 

In 2015 we wrote in this article The Brains but not the Guts that European universities generated the best ideas and breakthroughs in translation technology but we let a lot of this knowledge vanish. We exported ‘our’ brains to the US big tech companies, which were then the first to conquer the market with Machine Translation technology. We urged the European Commission to invest 1 Billion Euro and solve the European translation problem for good. However the thinking must have been: let Google and Microsoft deal with it.

What a difference a decade makes. Today, European translation technology companies are back in the lead. At the TAUS conference in Rome we are celebrating the Brains ánd the Guts in European Translation Technology.