ABOUT THE FORUM
A "Europe of the regions" was the idea of the European Commission under its former president Jacques Delors: the aim was to promote the regions in the EU member states and support them in their regional autonomy. As part of this process of making the regions real actors in European politics, changes were made in the structural funding arrangements of the European Union. This has created new opportunities for regions to receive funding and participate in the EU policy process.
Within many EU states, the regions have been given more competences since the 1970s. The process of European integration, combined with decentralisation in many Member States, has given the regions tools for a more active role in the European Union. In order to increase their influence in Brussels, many regions have established networks.
In this context, the Federal Union of European Nationalities (FUEN) has launched the "Forum of European Minority Regions" - as a place for cooperation and networking. The goals: to increase the political weight of the individual regions and to exert a stronger influence on EU policy through a united appearance. In addition, the forum offers a space for exchange and analysis of the status quo with regard to minority rights and learning from best-practice examples.
Regional and minority languages are spoken by about 40 million people in Europe. It is precisely those regions where linguistic or ethnic autochthonous minorities live that strengthen European ties in a special way. Europe's minority regions form bridges between the Member States and play a decisive role in European integration.
Minorities contribute to the economic and social development of these regions. It is therefore no coincidence that some of these regions are among the wealthiest in Europe - South Tyrol, with the highest GDP per capita in Italy, or the Basque Country and Navarre, the richest regions in Spain, are good examples.
"Digitalisation – Challenges and opportunities for minorities"
Time: 26-27 November 2024
Place: San Sebastián/Donostia in the Basque Country, Spain
Organised by FUEN in collaboration with the Langune.
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 up-dated.
Minorities frequently has to resort to machine translation since the digital content is not available in their languages.
FUEN’s 8th Forum of the European Minority Regions – Digitalisation – Challenges and opportunities for minorities 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 5000 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 in 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 contributes to the prestige of the language an 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.
REGISTRATION
DRAFT PROGRAM
| till 20:00 | Individual arrival and start of the program |
| 20:30 | Dinner at the hotel |
| from 8:00 | Breakfast at the hotel |
| 9:00 - 9:30 | Introduction
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| 9:30 - 11:00 | The added value of the language industry How can economies benefit from a strong and vital language industry? (1 hour)
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| 11:00 - 11:30 | Coffee break |
| 11:30 - 12:30 | How can countries support and fund the development of language technologies?
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| 12:30 - 13:30 | Foster cooperation of minority languages to advance digitalisation & artificial intelligence
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| 13:30 - 15:00 | Lunch |
| 15:00 - 16:30 | “...this page is not available in...”
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| 16:30 - 17:30 | An entire value chain from research to application to strengthen the language and economy of our communities
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| 19:30 | Dinner |
| from 8:00 | Breakfast at the hotel |
| 9:30 - 9:45 | Introduction to the second day |
| 9:45 - 10:30 | Tax incentives to promote digitalisation in minority languages. |
| 10:30 - 11:30 | Digitalisation of the entertainment industry (video games, etc) in minority languages Panel discussion with 3 examples from 3 different countries:
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| 11:30 - 12:30 | Minority languages in audiovisuals and medias
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| 12:30 - 13:00 | Forum closure |
| 13:00 - 15:00 | Lunch |
| 15:00 - 18:00 | Excursion around Donostia or the region Gipuzkoa. For example, Pasaia and Albaola, or Getaria... Museum Balenciaga, Aquarium or San Telmo... |
| from 19:00 | Dinner |
| from 8:00 | Breakfast at the hotel and check-out |
| 9:00 - 12:30 | Evaluation of the conference |
| from 12:30 | END OF PROGRAMME and individual departure |
