This paper presents a joint translation project implemented by the Directorate-General for Translation (DGT) of the European Commission and participating universities from the European Master’s in Translation Network (EMT), including the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (ΑUTH).
The project was initiated during the spring semester of 2026 by the requesting AI Unit of the DGT and was coordinated by Professors Sánchez Gijón and Susana Valdez, EMT Board members and co-leaders of Working Group 5 on Linguistic Data and Terminology. The project’s primary objective is to translate the MMLU dataset into all European languages and therefore contribute to the EU-oriented evaluation of Large Language Models (LLMs). Thus, this initiative aligns with EU’s commitment to advancing Language Technologies (European Declaration on Digital Rights and Principles, 2023).
To this end, a subset of the Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) dataset, a widely used benchmark for assessing LLM capabilities, has been translated into 11 EU official languages which were taken up by the EMT member programmes for this first edition. These fully human translations are meant to act as a 'golden standard'. Therefore, EMT students were asked to produce translations of specialised texts (biology, sociology, chemistry, etc.) into their mother tongue without using neural machine translation (NMT) or AI solutions. Quality assessment was conducted both by student revisers and academic supervisors.
This paper outlines the workflow, guidelines, methodology, and tools employed in this collaborative project at AUTH, focusing on Greek as the target language and on the experiences of translation students/lecturers within this educational context. It reflects on the pedagogical insights gained, with emphasis on student engagement, skills development, and the integration of real-world industry practices into translator training in the Greek context. Finally, the paper explores how the challenge of translating without the use of NMT or AI tools is perceived by participants.
Dr. Elpida Loupaki is Associate Professor at the Department of French Language and Literature and member of the Laboratory Translation and Natural Language Processing (EMEL) at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece. Since 2002, she has been teaching General Translation, Specialized Translation and Terminology Management both at the undergraduate and postgraduate level. She is the director of the Masters’ Program of Professional Translation at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, the academic coordinator for the Translation Section and coordinator for the internship program. She had published several papers in international journals and collective volumes, in the fields of Terminology Management, EU translation, and Teaching terminology. She has coordinated numerous terminology projects in collaboration with international and European organizations such as the WIPO, the DGT of the European Commission and TermCoord of the European Parliament. She was leading the Greek team of the Erasmus+ project “DIALOGOS: Communication in Public Services Interpreting and Translation with Languages of Lesser Diffusion” and has participated in European and nationally funded projects. She is a member of the European Society for Translation Studies, a member of the Hellenic Society for Translation Studies and a member of the Board of the Hellenic Society for Terminology.
Η Παρθένα Χαραλαμπίδου είναι Επίκουρη Καθηγήτρια στο Τμήμα Γαλλικής Γλώσσας και Φιλολογίας του Αριστοτελείου Πανεπιστημίου Θεσσαλονίκης με γνωστικό αντικείμενο Σύγχρονες μεταφραστικές πρακτικές με εφαρμογές στη γαλλική-ελληνική γλώσσα, όπου διδάσκει μαθήματα που αφορούν την επιχώρια προσαρμογή ψηφιακού υλικού, την πολυτροπική μετάφραση, τη διαχείριση μεταφραστικού έργου, καθώς και τη μετεπιμέλεια κειμένων από αυτόματη μετάφραση και Τεχνητή Νοημοσύνη, τόσο σε προπτυχιακό, όσο και σε μεταπτυχιακό επίπεδο. Συμμετέχει ενεργά σε διεθνή δίκτυα για τη μετάφραση όπως το Διεθνές Δίκτυο Προσομοίωσης Μεταφραστικών Γραφείων INSTB και το δίκτυο για τη δημιουργία Πολύγλωσσου Σώματος Κειμένων Εκπαιδευομένων στη Μετάφραση MUST και έχει υπάρξει μέλος ερευνητικών ομάδων σε διεθνή ερευνητικά προγράμματα, όπως το Erasmus+ Dialogos και το Cost Action Language in the Human-Machine Era (LITHME). Η έρευνά της έχει δημοσιευθεί σε εξειδικευμένα επιστημονικά περιοδικά όπως το Forum, το Punctum, το Syn-thèses, το The Journal of Internationalization and Localization και το The Journal of Specialized Translation, ενώ έχει συνεπιμεληθεί Τόμους για τη μετάφραση και τις σύγχρονες πτυχές της, τόσο σε εγχώριο, όσο και σε διεθνές πλαίσιο. Είναι μέλος της Ευρωπαϊκής Εταιρείας για τη Μεταφρασεολογία (EST), καθώς και της Ελληνικής Εταιρείας Μεταφρασεολογίας (ΕΕμ), στην οποία ασκεί καθήκοντα Προέδρου από το 2026.
Dr. Elina Symseridou is a professional translator and Laboratory Teaching Staff member at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, teaching translation courses from French and English into Greek at the bachelor and postgraduate level. She holds a PhD in Applied Translation Studies from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, where her doctoral research explored specialized translation pedagogy, with a focus on creating and using ad hoc corpora and developing teaching approaches that utilize digital technologies. She also earned a BA and an MA in Professional Translation from the Institut de Traducteurs, d’Interprètes et de Relations Internationales (ITIRI) at the University of Strasbourg, as well as a BA in French Language and Literature from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Currently a postdoctoral researcher, her work investigates the determinologization of medical texts within the framework of community translation. Additionally, she has participated in the European project DIALOGOS, which addresses the communication barriers faced by migrants, specifically those from countries with languages of lesser diffusion.
Pilar Sánchez Gijón is a full professor in the Department of Translation and Interpreting and East Asian Studies at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). She holds a PhD in translation theory from UAB (2003) and a BA in translation and interpreting, specialising in German, also from UAB (1997). She is a sworn translator from German into Spanish. She teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses on translation technology, terminology management, post-editing and translation project management and quality. Since 2001, she has been the director of the master’s in Tradumàtica. From 2014 to 2017 she was Head of the Department of Translation and Interpreting and East Asian Studies, and from 2019 to 2024 she was academic secretary and vice-dean of undergraduate and postgraduate studies. She has published extensively in leading journals and monographs on topics such as machine translation, post-editing, translation technologies and applied terminology. Since 2015 she has also been editor-in-chief of Revista Tradumàtica (covering translation technologies).
Susana Valdez is an Assistant Professor of Translation Studies at Leiden University (Netherlands). She serves on the board of the European Masters in Translation network, co-leads the Linguistic Data and Terminology working group with Pilar Sanchez Gijon, and coordinates the DGT–EMT MMLU Dataset Localization Project. Her PhD (Summa Cum Laude, 2019), conducted in co-tutelle between the universities of Lisbon and Ghent, focused on expert-to-expert communication in multilingual healthcare settings. Since then, her research has examined how health information is accessed, read, and understood in healthcare contexts, and the role of technology in bridging language and cultural barriers for migrant communities, with an emphasis on linguistic diversity. She currently leads funded research projects exploring multi-method approaches to reader reception of health information and the impact of technology on the reading process. In the last five years, she has published over 20 research outputs in peer-reviewed and highly regarded journals (Target, The Translator, Translation Spaces, Perspectives, and The Journal of Specialised Translation) and publishers (Routledge) on health communication, migration, and translation technology. Before taking up her current position, she had spent 15 years in the translation industry and was an invited lecturer at NOVA and Lisbon universities. For further details, see https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5461-2078
Cristian Brasoveanu is the Head of Sector for AI Innovation at DG Translation. He coordinates several key activities and projects in the area of AI. That includes AI prototyping activities for new AI-based multilingual services, the EU Institutional LLM project building on DGT’s own data, and the AI@EC Network as the European Commission’s internal AI community. In the past, he worked as a policy and programme officer at DG CONNECT, including in the area of AI and robotics. Before that, he had other roles at DG Translation, including as translator in the English Language Department.
Jozef Štefánik graduated in Slovak, English and Spanish from the Faculty of Arts of Comenius University in Bratislava. In 1995 he received his doctorate (PhD) and in 2001 he was appointed associate professor (Docent). From 1987 to 2006 he taught at various universities, including Comenius University in Bratislava, the University of Pittsburgh, HANKUK University in Seoul and ELTE University in Budapest. During this period, he also worked as a freelance translator. He is the author and co-author of several books; author of more than 50 scientific studies and articles on various topics, including general and Slovak linguistics, psycholinguistics, bilingualism and multilingualism; editor of the first anthology of bilingualism in Slovak as well as of several books of proceedings of international conferences and colloquia on the topic of bilingualism and multilingualism. From 2007 to 2009, he worked as a translator at Directorate General for Translation (DGT) of the European Commission (EC) in Luxembourg and from 2009 to 2012, he was a quality officer in the Slovak translation unit of the European Parliament (EP). From 2012 to 2023, he worked as Head of the Slovak Language Department (DGT, EC). Since October 2023 he has been Head of Department DGT B.2, which includes Greek and Romanian.
Anna Kokkinidou, with a PhD in legal translation (Summa Cum Laude, 2026,Democritus University of Thrace) has been working in the coordination of the European Master’s in Translation (EMT) at the European Commission's DG for Translation since September 2023. Her doctoral thesis focuses on training methodologies for legal translation, catering to both translators without a legal background and lawyers/jurists without a translation background. Her extensive career includes roles as a translator at the European Parliament, a lawyer-linguist at the CJEU, a freelance translator for the European Commission, and many years as a professional legal translator in Greece. Prior to her work in the EU institutions, she served as a research assistant at the Centre for the Greek Language, where she contributed to key projects on the translation of the CEFR, the legislation for the establishment of CEF levels in Greek, the language rights and certification of asylum-seekers, test design, and teacher training. Her academic interests align with this experience, covering the teaching of legal translation—including the use of GenAI—and the acquisition of Greek as L2/FL. Except for her academic publications, she is a published author (two short novels and a poetry collection, contributions to the Greek Press) with her fourth book (poetry) under publication.
