"Hizkuntzen Irabazia – Benefits of Language Industry in the Economy"
Time: 26-27 November 2024
Place: San Sebastián/Donostia in the Basque Country, Spain

Organised by FUEN in collaboration with Langune.
This link will provide you with information about the forum in Spanish or Basque.

How often do you find information on the web when you look for it in your language? How often do you find that the information in your minority language does correspond with that in the majority language? It also happens that the virtual version in the minority language is not updated.

Minorities frequently have to resort to machine translation since the digital content is not available in their languages.

FUEN’s 8^th Forum of the European Minority Regions – Hizkuntzen Irabazia – Benefits of Language Industry in the Economy is organised in San Sebastián/Donostia in the Basque Country on 26-27 November 2024

Our aim is to describe the digital reality by analysing how public authorities, commercial actors and others build their language presence on the web.

An important issue is the rapidly increased role that artificial intelligence plays in our societies and for our minority communities. Artificial intelligence provides a unique opportunity to promote our languages and cultures.

Not only AI, but also the language industry is an opportunity for our minorities and our bilingual regions to create growth, jobs and wealth. The languages industry is crucial for the economy of our regions. For instance, in the Basque Country the language industry cluster covers more than 500 companies and employs over 5000 persons.

The language industry includes language and speech technologies, such as machine translation, automatic speech recognition, text-to-speech, natural language generation, automatic summarization and finally text analysis and tagging.

The use of language and speech technologies is increasing rapidly and it’s of vital importance that minorities keep up with this fast development, that in many ways will revolutionise our societies. In this context, the European Parliament resolution from 2018 “language equality in the digital age” provides a framework.

A clear risk or challenge is that digitalisation decreases the motivation to learn languages. Machine created text and machine translation can also impoverish our languages. Challenges are also the speed of change, insufficient amount of data needed and computing power required.

However, the advantages and opportunities for minorities widely outnumber the risks or challenges. Today we have far more digital content than ever before. The use of audiovisual content has quadrupled in less than a decade.

Technologies can help normalise the use of minority languages. Language technologies also contribute to the prestige of the language and empower especially small minority communities and its speaker. Technologies contribute to universal accessibility to the even small and previously ‘remote’ language.

The sessions of our Forum will also be dedicated to the rapidly expanding and financially important digitalisation of the entertainment industry (such as video games) in minority languages and the role of minority languages in audiovisuals, such as subtitling, dubbing, audiobooks.

Finally, we discuss how countries and regions can support and fund the development of language technologies, including tax incentives to promote digitalisation in minority languages.

We hope that you will participate in the Forum, which we believe will be epoch-making in terms of content and certainly memorable for both us and our participants thanks to meaningful debates with expert panellists from all over Europe.

Info sheet for participants