I am honored to be here with you today
my presentation will focus on the need
for language
digitization and why accelerating
implementations is vital to indigenous
communities we take language technology
for granted as it is part of our
everyday life and we don't realize the
vast effort required in digitizing an
indigenous language with a unique
script what exactly is involved in
digitizing a
language I would like to share how
translation Commons created the language
digitization initiative to help
communities who want the benefits of
language
digitization there are many components
to this initiative including the
enabling of indigenous communities to
pursue and manage the digitization
process
themselves as a volunteer community of
language techn ologists we came together
with a vision to enable all languages
access to the internet and its benefits
by creating free resources tools and
training for indigenous
communities our Advisory Board is a team
of language technology experts who have
worked with indigenous communities in
many different areas of the world
throughout their careers our team
consists of computer engineers linguists
termin technology experts keyboard
creators Unicode Specialists and
language professionals all of whom come
together because of a passion for
supporting linguistic diversity and the
indigenous languages of the
world here are some basic steps that
indigenous languages will have to do in
order to reach the level of automation
of the main digital
languages this is a complex and lengthy
process involving multiple organiz
ganizations and people first they need
to enable their script online and to
create enough content to be able to
leverage existing language Technologies
by applying to Unicode creating fonts
and keyboards and Gathering basic data
sets by using these Technologies they
also increase the digital content which
improves their digital experience and
accuracy of the
applications to be precise all the big
and small small tech companies can only
add a language and script on their
applications once all of these initial
steps are completed and they pull data
from
Unicode in this workflow we have
captured the dependencies and
complexities of language
digitization the line is straight only
for purposes of illustration in
capturing the distinct efforts needed
for each
discipline each language in the world
has a different digital footprint even
some of the top 100 languages are not
fully represented in the entire language
technology workflow shown here it is a
complex and multi-stakeholder journey
for any language to be fully developed
digitally we need font designs and input
methods so thousands of endangered
languages can start this journey we need
educational material to increase the
digital content we need data sets so
most languages can have functional
automation support in applications and
we need properly trained linguists so
knowledge will be shared and cultural
Treasures Will
Survive multi-stakeholder Partnerships
are very important and particularly
partnering with language professional
experts our expertise will help build
the language technology tools which in
turn will facilitate the adoption of the
new Languages by the tech industry who
will Implement them in their
applications and
products I would like to demonstrate how
we translated the iil and idil partner
requirements into Global scalable
projects with actionable
deliverables these projects can be
grouped in four broad categories events
we have created in person and online
free resources designed to help
indigenous communities and members tools
we created such as keyboards and finally
our expert consultation and guidance
through the digitization
process during 2019 we created over 35
iil events in universities around the
world it seems like hard work but we
created a scalable framework to
accomplish this first we brought
together a team of six interns who
gathered information on language
departments in universities around the
world then we created guidelines of what
and how each Professor could create
different events to promote and create
Awareness on local indigenous
languages next we created lists of
resources that the professors and
students could use during their
events we added examples of different
types of events and we provided support
by our centralized volunteer
team we reached out to 650 universities
of which 60 professors created events
which we uploaded on the UNESCO iil
website following the success of the
2019 event creation campaign UNESCO
asked us to keep the professor Community
engaged until the onset of ID in
2022 during monthly meetings we shared
knowledge and projects created ating
many video resources all available on
the translation Commons YouTube
channel the community of practice
evolved into a very active steering
committee for online events organized
jointly by idil and translation
comment we take the opportunity to
celebrate various International days and
during each event we draw attention to
the issues faced by indigenous
communities that are relevant to the
subject of the international day I would
like to invite you to join us on any of
the upcoming events and share your
work in breaking down the language
digitization process we're able to
create resources for each step these
resources vary from documents video
presentations by experts training
workshops and educational material we
are also creating templates and tools
such as keyboards and reposit
technology we created the document zero
to digital capturing information never
documented before on how when language
gets digitized this is the first of many
guidelines helping communities navigate
step by step the basic elements of
digitizing their
languages our expert advisers and
volunteers continue to create new
guidelines to cover all aspects of langu
language technology for the benefit of
indigenous
communities we offer keyboard creation
to communities that don't have one this
service is volunteer based and free the
keyboard creation project is a
collaboration with each Community
ensuring that the design reflects the
language and culture our keyboard
experts from industry and Academia guide
the community members in collecting
language requirements
and provide training on keyboard
implementation the resulting keyboards
are open source and publicly available
under creative
license the team has worked and created
multiple keyboards for communities
around the world here are some of them
these keyboards are virtual not physical
on desktop computers they replace the
characters generated by the physical
keyboard with the desired
characters on mobile devices the
onscreen keyboard is
replaced we assisted the sunu war
language community in creating a Unicode
proposal for their script encoding which
has been approved we prototype their
keyboard and now we're working together
to create Unicode fonts and do a final
push to get the big computer companies
and platforms to include the sunow war
script on the company's defaults list of
scripts offered to their
customers I hope I have shared with you
the urgency to accelerate
implementations and the need for
multistakeholder Partnerships between
indigenous communities national
government agencies industry Academia
and
nonprofits we are always available to
help and share please feel free to
contact us thank you