Across Language Barriers in Multilingual Europe
The European Commission supports the Digital Single Market by enabling European citizens to communicate freely across language barriers. The machine translation platform MТ@EC is available to the public administration in all countries of the European Union, Iceland and Norway. MT@EC is a foundation for building CEF.AT, the new machine translation platform funded by JoinUp Europe (CEF). In order to adapt the CEF.AT system to the public administration of the European countries, the need arises for linguistic data and translational texts which reflect specific national features.
The European Language Resources Coordination service (ELRC) is an initiative of the European Commission to collect linguistic resources for machine translation for the purpose of CEF.AT meeting the needs of public administrstion in the European Union, Iceland and Norway. Members of the Department of Computational Linguistics at the Institute for Bulgarian Language, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences have joined the initiative.
On the European Day of Languages, ceebrated on the 26th September, the following message is published in all countries of the European Union. Three years ago the META-NET Network for Excellence announced its White Paper Series, which was widely covered by many media around Europe and caused worries among the public. (Bulgarian media were amongst the most active with 54 out of 588 publications.) The White Papers Series “Europen Languages in the Digital Age” warned that most European languages (in particular smal ones) are unlikely to survive in the Digital Age. The Digital Single Market (DSM), a key goal of the European Commission for 2020, is fundamentally multilingual. However, until now, most European languages have not enjoyed adequate language technology support to enable work, life and trade without borders. In fact, Europe’s cherished linguistic diversity can turn into an obstacle when it hinders the free exchange of information or prevents unbiased access to public services, business opportunities, job opportunities, and support.
Especially in the emerging Digital Single Market, language barriers thus create invisible borders. While 99% of all European businesses are small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), only 7% of them sell cross-border and cross-language (Why we need a digital single market). Similarly, 90% of all European customers prefer to browse websites in their own language (Eurobarometer #313: User language preferences online). Hence, providing instant language support and enabling day-to-day multilinguality can have significant benefits for both economy and society. It is estimated that a Digital Single Market can actually create up to €340 billion in additional growth, hundreds of thousands of new jobs, and a vibrant knowledge-based society (Why we need a digital single market).
