Eurodicautom was initially developed to assist in-house translators. A free online version was available on the web in 1997 for European Union officials and for language professionals throughout the world.
Eurodicautom covered "a broad spectrum of human knowledge", mainly relating to economy, science, technology and legislation in the European Union (EU), to answer the needs of the 15 member countries in 11 official languages (Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish), plus Latin.
The project of a larger terminology database was studied as early as 1999 to merge the existing databases for a better inter- institutional cooperation between the European organizations. The project partners were the European Commission, the European Parliament, the Council of the European Union, the Court of Justice, the European Court of Auditors, the European Economic and Social Committee, the Committee of the Regions, the European Investment Bank, the European Central Bank, and the Translation Centre for the Bodies of the European Union.
Eurodicautom had 12,000 visits a day in late 2003, when it closed to prepare for a larger terminology database that would include the databases of other official European institutions. The new database would be available in many more languages, more than 20 languages instead of 12, because of the Enlargement of the European Union planned in 2004 to include new countries from Central and Eastern Europe. The European Union went from 15 country members to 25 country members in May 2004, and 27 country members in January 2007.
IATE (InterActive Terminology for Europe) was launched in March 2007 as an eagerly free service on the web, after been launched in summer 2004 on the intranet of the participating European institutions, with 1.4 million entries in the 23 official languages of the European Union (Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish, Swedish), plus Latin.
The website has been maintained by the Translation Center of the European Union institutions in Luxembourg. According to the IATE brochure, also available in the 23 official languages, IATE offered 8,4 million words in 2010, including 540,000 abbreviations and 130.000 expressions.
1997 > BABEL FISH, A FREE TRANSLATION SOFTWARE
[Summary] In December 1997, the search engine AltaVista launched the first free machine translation software called Babel Fish or AltaVista Translation, which could translate webpages or short texts from English into French, German, Italian, Portuguese or Spanish, and vice versa. The software was developed by Systran (an acronym for "System Translation"), a company specializing in automated language solutions. Babel Fish was a “hit” among the 12 million internet users of the time, who included more and more non- English-speaking users, and greatly contributed to a plurilingual web. Other tools were developed then by Alis Technologies, Globalink, Lernout & Hauspie and Softissimo, with free and/or paid versions available on the web.
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In December 1997, the search engine AltaVista launched Babel Fish as the first free machine translation software from English to five other languages.