The technologies of language, an opportunity to Galician society

The Consello da Cultura Galega organizes this conference that explores the technological applications related to language to analyze the presence of Galician language in the digital space. Pablo Romero Fresco, one of the researchers of the project EUVOS. Intangible Cultural Heritage. For a European program of subtitling in non-hegemonic languages ​​(AEI, ref CSO2016-76014-R), takes part in this project, also as the director of GALMA, Galician observatory of accessibility to the media.

Converting speech into text and automatically translating are two relevant aspects of the relationship between languages ​​and technology. On these subjects works the day “The technologies of language” organized by the Galician Culture Council. Those responsible for companies such as Google, RTVE, Galma, Vicomtech and university experts will discuss these issues in a day that can be followed live from the CCG website. The president of the institution, Rosario Álvarez; the general secretary of Linguistic Policy, Valentín García; and the coordinator of the day, Carmen García Mateo, will be in charge of opening this event, which seeks an eminently practical approach.

“With this day what we wanted is to demonstrate how new technologies affect society, and more specifically to technologies of languages” explained Carmen García Mateo, coordinator of this meeting that brings together national and international experts. “As it is a broad field, during the day we focused on two specific aspects: on the one hand, the accessibility to audiovisual media, that is, the ease of access to audiovisual content for people with disabilities and, on the other, the speech technology, to see the case of automatic subtitling “she added. On these premises is built a program that begins with a general report of Lourdes Lorenzo, from the Department of Translation and Linguistics of the University of Vigo, who will offer a state of the question of how is the accessibility to audiovisual content in our country. Then, Francisco Armero Real, director of the Accessibility Area of ​​TVE, who will talk about the current state and the most immediate future of a leading accessibility company such as Televisión Española.
The second part of the program aims to see the technologies of speech in the specific field of subtitling and the technologies that facilitate it. For that there will be three speakers: Bélen Ruiz Mezcúa, director of the Spanish Center of Subtitling and Audio description; Pablo Romero-Fresco, director of GALMA, Galician observatory of accessibility to the media; and Arantza del Pozo, director of the Department of Speech and Natural Language Technologies of Vicomtech.
Bélen Ruiz will focus his report on describing how the subtitling offer evolved in national TV channels since 2011. Pablo Romero will focus this evolution on live subtitling at the state level, while Arantza del Pozo will describe success stories and novelties in automatic translation

The afternoon session will timidly open the focus to other aspects. On the one hand, José Ramón Pichel, from Imaxin Software, will bring language technologies closer when talking about machine translation that will allow the existence of media in Galician. Due to time issues, the video conference of Pedro J Moreno, from Google Research, is scheduled for the afternoon, which will attempt to shed light on the reasons that lead the American multinational to develop technology in Galician. The reports of the day conclude with Carmen García Mateo, will make an overview of existing tools while placing reflections for the future.

[Text and image: CDG]