Thursday 16 July 2020

Translate4Rail progresses well with the target of breaking the language barrier in the railway system

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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.

This project has received funding from the Shift2Rail Joint Undertaking (JU) under grant agreement No 881779. The JU receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and the Shift2Rail JU members other than the Union.

For further information please contact:
UIC: Sandra Géhénot, UIC Freight Director
gehenot@uic.org

Constanze Bannholzer, Senior Freight Advisor
bannholzer@uic.org

Philip Van Den Bosch, Senior Freight Advisor
vandenbosch@uic.org

RNE: Peter Šišolák, Head of TM and TPM
peter.sisolak@rne.eu

Juraj Maliaček, Traffic Management Manager
juraj.maliacek@rne.eu

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