Accelerating Digital Support for Indigenous Languages

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