The Shift2Rail funded project “Translate4Rail” (T4R), which is a two-year project, coordinated by the UIC Freight Department as a common project of UIC and RNE, as a joint initiative between railway undertakings (RUs) represented by UIC and infrastructure managers (IMs) represented by RailNetEurope (RNE), held its Advisory Board Meeting as a web conference on 9 July 2020.
In order to achieve the target to enable drivers and traffic controllers to understand each other even though they each speak in their native language, the board was informed about the state of play on the progress of the Language Tool development, which is fed with predefined standardised messages and also able to work with free speech.
During the demonstration of the progress in tool developement and while discussing the iteration between the improvement and optimisation of guidelines, safety and the language tool; Mihaela Williams representative of the European Commission clearly pointed out that the Commission had the approach T4R is implementing in mind, with regard to regulation (EU) 2019/554 amending Annex VI to Directive 2007/59/E in which the opportunity is offered to explore alternative options to the current language requirements allowing for greater flexibility but ensuring at least an equivalent level of safety with the current requirements.
In the first T4R pilots governed by Rete Ferroviaria Italiana (RFI), ÖBB-Infrastruktur AG (ÖBB Infra) in which the language tool will be tested involves Rail Cargo Group (RCA). The T4R Consortium also warmly welcomes two other railway undertakings, DB Cargo Italy (DB Cargo) and Mercitalia, which have shown a significant interest in participating in the pilot testing.
The project partners, UIC and RNE, are supported by RUs, IMs, CIT, VDV, EUAR, NEW OPERA who are the part of the project Stakeholder Advisory Board. Other interested stakeholders are welcome to contact UIC.
