The Translate4Rail (T4R) project has been developing a prototype tool, for which a demonstration was held on 1 February 2023 in a meeting at the UIC HQ in Paris with the participation of the French National Safety Authority (EPSF), representatives from the Railways and Guided Transport Division of the French Ministry of Transport, SNCF Fret, and project members, including UIC, RNE and Synvance.
Supported by the prototype developer SYNVANCE, UIC and RNE presented T4R’s main goals, the results of the project, and then demonstrated the functions of the tool to the attendees.
The Shift2Rail funded T4R project began in December 2019 as a joint initiative between railway undertakings (represented by UIC) and infrastructure managers (represented by RNE). The aim was to enable communication between train drivers and traffic controllers who do not speak the same language. The prototype was used in two pilot tests between Italy and Austria, with the project coming to a close in December 2021.
UIC and RNE are continuing to work together to overcome language barriers and have demonstrated the T4R project results on several occasions, such as at InnoTrans 2022 and the Transport Research Arena 2022 by invitation from Europe’s Rail. The prototype developed in the T4R project is being used for research purposes in an on-going pilot scheme between the Slovenian and Italian borders under the Language Programme for IM-IM regional communication (RECOMI). There are also plans to use the prototype for further research purposes through the UIC opt-in project “Train driver communication with IM-RU communication purposes in the near future”.
