Gaio Translator

Gaio: how we turned machine translation into a public service useful for all of Galicia

At imaxin we have spent years working to make language technology genuinely useful in real work environments. One of the projects that best represents that vision is Gaio, the machine translator of the Xunta de Galicia.

In 2013 we were awarded the tender through which our Opentrad technology became the translation platform for the regional government and local administrations of Galicia. Building on that project, the Xunta launched the service under the name Gaio.

From the outset, the challenge was not simply to develop a translator, but to create a tool capable of meeting a very specific need: facilitating the use of Galician in the day-to-day work of the Administration, with an agile, specialised solution adapted to its workflows. The Xunta itself presented Gaio as a resource for translating texts, documents and web pages, aimed at both Administration staff and, subsequently, the general public.

Our contribution was to transform a solid technological foundation into a genuinely operational service for the public sector. Gaio enabled direct and reverse translation of texts and websites between Galician, Spanish, Portuguese, English, French and Catalan, and also incorporated translation of documents in standard office formats. Above all, we equipped it with a layer of specialisation essential for the Administration: institutional terminology, official nomenclature and linguistic customisation linked to the Galician context. The Xunta went on to publicly highlight that the system included a customisation of more than 16,000 terms covering Galician place names and specific administrative terminology. 

This approach was key to ensuring that Gaio did not remain a generic tool, but instead became a linguistic infrastructure useful for daily work. The service was first used internally within the Administration and, in September 2015, the Xunta opened it to the general public. A year later, its mobile application also became available, further broadening access to the service. 

The results clearly demonstrate the project's reach. In November 2016, the Xunta reported that Gaio had exceeded 250 million translated words since its public launch, with 4.3 million queries and thousands of downloads of its mobile application. In subsequent activity reports, Amtega continued to reflect the technological and linguistic evolution of the system as part of its digital services. 

For us, this project is a success story because it demonstrates that language technology generates the greatest value when it is designed to address specific needs. With Gaio we did not only contribute machine translation capability: we contributed institutional contextualisation, scalability, continuity of service and a clear vision of how technology can help a language be present where it truly matters.

Gaio is a strong embodiment of our way of working: turning linguistic intelligence into a useful tool, integrated and with real impact. A project in which we placed our machine translation expertise at the service of the Xunta de Galicia to help build a more accessible, more efficient Administration, one that is more coherent with its linguistic reality.