MEEPL

Initial situation

Translation – a daily task that for many staff members in the army and administration evokes associations with extra effort and little satisfaction. This is especially true as many of the translators are only truly familiar with one of the two involved languages, which affects the quality. In multilingual, internationally connected Switzerland, with its four living national languages and English in international exchange, translation is essential and therefore a daily activity.

Problem statement

The Swiss Army has specific requirements for software solutions. For example, their operation must be ensured on federal servers. Publicly accessible cloud solutions can, if at all, only be used to a limited extent. When it comes to classified information, additional security requirements apply. Well-known applications used in private life, such as DeepL, are therefore not suitable for efficient official use.

It should also be noted that, without support tools, military staffs in multilingual units spend a considerable amount of time translating documents from one language to another. This task is often assigned to young, newly assigned officers who have just completed their training and, as knowledge carriers, are up to date and ideally would be deployed elsewhere.

Solution / Product

“MeepL” allows employees of the Defense Group to translate texts freely between German, French, Italian, and English. Although the software is “commercial off the shelf” (COTS), it runs on secure servers, providing a higher level of security than traditional tools like Google Translate or DeepL. Its AI is continuously trained with the linguistic habits and standards of the Swiss Army to handle Swiss military language and often multilingual place names and geographical terms. Users can directly input documents and receive them back in the same format (e.g., Word) translated. The time savings are significant – initial tests in 2023 already showed a 45% acceleration.