Aragon hosts a European meeting on minority languages with Aragonese as protagonist

On 26 April, 6 Basque, French and Spanish entities will meet in Zaragoza within the European project “LINGUATEC” to work together in a workshop on experiences of digitization of minority languages.

The workshop “Experiences of digitization of minority languages” will take place in Zaragoza, at 10:30 hours on 26 April 2018, and will be chaired by the Councillor of the Council of Spatial Planning, Mobility and Housing of the Government of Aragon. Representatives of the 6 entities that make up the LINGUATEC project will participate.

The EFA 227/16/LINGUATEC project “Development of cross-border cooperation and knowledge transfer in language technologies” aims to develop, demonstrate and disseminate innovative language resources, tools and applications that improve the level of digitization of Aragonese, Basque and Occitan. To do this it has a consortium formed by 6 entities:

1. ELHUYAR Foundation

2. Permanent Congress of Lenga Occitana

3. University of the Basque Country

4th CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)- Delegation Regionale Midipyrenees

5. EUSKALTZAINDIA

6th Promotion and Management Society of Aragonese Tourism, S.L.U.

Cross-border cooperation will enable the transfer of knowledge and the development of language solutions with market potential, as well as the benefit for language professionals, public access to multilingual content and progress in the development of a cross-border cluster of language technologies.

Thanks to the collaboration of the 6 partners of the project, the following results are expected:

• A road map for the digitization of Aragonese

• 5 new language resources (occitan: monolingual and bilingual lexicon – occitan/other languages – morphosyntactic and syntactic analysis; basque: vocal recognition)

• Develop or improve 8 language tools (Occitan, Aragonese and Basque vocal synthesis of Iparralde; textual detector of Occitan and Occitan variants; improvement of French-Occitan, Spanish-Basque, Spanish-Aragonese automatic translations).

• Development of 6 innovative applications: downloadable machine translation bar for web pages; CMS machine translation application; machine translation application between Pyrenean languages; Unified Basque Digital Manual; Aragonese Online Dictionary; multilingual semantic web browser.

• An agreement between universities and companies for the commercialization of solutions.

The EFA227/16/LINGUATEC project was approved in the second POCTEFA call, with a budget of 1.227.500 euros, of which 65% is financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) through the Interreg V-A Spain-France-Andorra program (POCTEFA 2014-2020). POCTEFA aims to strengthen the economic and social integration of the Spain-France-Andorra border area. This assistance is aimed at the development of cross-border economic, social and environmental activities through joint strategies for sustainable territorial development.

PROGRAM

Date: Thursday 26 April 2018.

Location: Hermanos Bayeu room of the Pignatelli building (ground floor, gate 19), Paseo María Agustín, 36. 50004, Zaragoza.

Time: 10:30 – 14:00.

10:30.- Inauguration by the Councillor of the Council of Spatial Planning, Mobility and Housing of the Government of Aragon.

10:45.- First presentation: The digitalization of Basque, by Josu Aztiria, head of the Language and Technology unit at Elhuyar.

Chat with attendees

11:45.- Coffee

12:15.- Second presentation: “Roadmap for the digitization of occitana”, by Benaset Dazés, representative of Lo Congrès Permanent de la Lenga Occitana, accompanied by Josu Aztiria, member of Elhuyar.

Chat with attendees

13:15.- Third presentation: “Roadmap for the digitization of Aragonese: resources and linguistic tools to be developed, development calendar and agents involved”, by the Head of Linguistic Policy Service of the Government of Aragon, Francho Beltrán Audea.

Chat with attendees

14:15.- Food