Blog

Recent news and updates regarding the Endangered Languages Project

  • Friday, May 20, 2016

    Preserving language: Torres Strait dialects critically endangered
    As published in the Koori Mail, www.koorimail.com 

    The Torres Strait is set to have its first traditional language plan and charter to guide the revitalisation of the region’s traditional languages, thanks to the work of the Torres Strait Language Reference Group.

    The draft Torres Strait Traditional Languages Plan and Charter are the products of the 2015 Torres Strait Language Symposium, hosted by the Torres Strait Regional Authority (TSRA), which saw language specialists from across the Torres Strait come together to celebrate and plan for the future of the region’s traditional languages.

    TSRA chairman Joseph Elu said that one year on from the symposium, there had been significant progress made towards future language revitalisation in the region. 
    “The 2015 symposium was a way of bringing communities together to discuss the state of our region’s traditional languages and plan for how to capitalise on some of the great work already being done in the language revitalisation space,” he said. The reference group is made up of elected representatives of each of the six language and dialect groups in the Torres Strait, and chaired by Maluyligal language group speaker Cygnet Repu.

    Mr Repu said the importance of the group’s work was underpinned by the knowledge that traditional languages of the Torres Strait were critically endangered.
    “Traditional languages and culture can never be separated. They will always run together,” he said. “But our languages will become extinct if work is not undertaken to revitalise them. “It’s all about the betterment of our children’s future. We have a collective responsibility and mandate to preserve our languages for them.”

    Mr Repu said the reference group had met multiple times since the symposium last year to work on the development of the language plan and charter, which he hoped could be launched in the next year. “There is a role for everyone to play in implementing the plan, whether it is through learning, teaching, or promoting the use of traditional languages,” he said. “It’s important for the younger generation to know that they won’t be the only ones being taught, but also some of their mums and dads as well.”

    Mr Repu said the language plan and charter would also encourage fluent language speakers to bring traditional language out into the community. “At the moment, when I step out of my house, I become someone else,” he said. “I have my phone with me, I have my iPad with me, and my language differentiates as well.“So what I’m teaching back home is that you don’t only have to be an Islander in the house, you need to be an Islander in the community as well.”

    Mr Elu said the TSRA had received funding in May last year through the Australian Government Ministry for the Arts for the establishment of a regional language centre.
    “The role of the regional language centre would be to provide support and resources to support language revitalisation in local communities through local community teams,” he said.

    Mr Repu praised this grassroots approach towards language revitalisation. “It’s important that we take ownership and direction,” he said. “It’s about empowering ordinary people to get involved and take control of the future of our languages.”



    Torres Strait Language Reference Group members Phillemon Mosby, 
    Milton Savage, Dana Ober, Benny Mabo, Bob Kaigey, Noel Baker, Alick Tipoti, 
    Cygnet Repu (chairperson) Maria Tapim, Mariana Babia and Denna Nona with TSRA representatives Aven Noah Snr, Leitha Assan and Elsie Passi, and Mer community members Alo Tapim, 
    Segar Passi, Nee Tabo and Lillah Noah.

  • Tuesday, April 12, 2016

    Open-source code for endangered languages: sharing free resources for language work

    Contributed by: Richard Littauer


    Open source software is amazing, and is changing the world. In case you don't know, "Open Source" means code that anyone can look at, and also use. It means that, while there may be a license, anyone can go borrow the code and use it in their program, for free. Your computer is running now using some open source code, even. This made your computer cheaper, because some pieces of software that were already developed didn't have to be reinvented. I'm a computational linguist; while studying, I realized that a lot of the tools I work with aren't free, or open source, and we have to keep developing them. This costs money and time. So, I wanted to see what was available to help people designing computational tools for endangered and under-resourced languages. I decided to start with a list.

    My list of open source resources for endangered languages on GitHub started incredibly simply: I just wanted a list of useful, free resources that people could use to do work with endangered languages.

    At the time, there was a new trend emerging on GitHub, which involved using README files to make collaborative documents. This was novel - in the programming world, Readme files traditionally explain other files in the folder, or how to run the program. On GitHub, the largest site for sharing code in the world, they were visible on each repository's page. This presented an opportunity - you could use the Readme as the content itself, everyone would see it immediately, and other people could contribute to it collaboratively using all of the tools that the versioning software git and the site GitHub offered. I realized that I could build a text-based database of tools for endangered, minority, or low-resource languages fairly easily, and that I could develop a community around cataloguing useful resources on GitHub, where the code was likely to be used more often. That was also why I focused on open source code: I wanted to find code that other people could use, share, and talk about easily, without worrying about licensing, royalties, or proprietary concerns.

    So, I made a small list, and kept adding to it as I saw more tools. Soon, there were other contributors who helped out, and the list got a tiny bit of traction. The low resource language community is not large, largely because it is fractured into researchers for each particular language. This has disadvantages - there's a lot of work which isn't shared or extended to other use cases. This leads to a lot of wasted work, and funding, and is a net loss for linguistic communities. My hope with this list is that people would look around, find something they can use, and save time, in the end.

    I am currently studying for a Masters in Computational Linguistics, and I've worked with languages that don't have much data, so I know a small amount about what tools are useful and how to find relevant code. Although I am a web developer by trade, I hope to continue building the list, and I am presenting a paper on it at the International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC) in May.

    The list isn't a panacea - it's a list. I'd like for the database to become more structured, for all software mentioned on it to be saved in a permanent repository (perhaps on GitHub), and for the projects themselves to be more useful at times. But these are challenges that I think can be overcome, and there are active discussions on how to do this in the repository's discussion board. Already, I know that it has been of use to a few researchers - I've gotten a few thanks, here and there - so I am hopeful for the future. I hope it will be useful to you as well.

    To check out the list, simply go to https://github.com/RichardLitt/endangered-languages. If you're interested in being involved, read through the issues on https://github.com/RichardLitt/endangered-languages/issues, or send me an email at richard.littauer@gmail.com.

  • Wednesday, September 23, 2015

    ELP Website Translated into Five Languages
    Contributed by: Linn Hu

    Everything started at an event at Google in February. The topic for the International Multilingual User Group (IMUG) event that night was “Global Linguistic Diversity and the Endangered Languages Project.” Shay Boechler, one of the speakers, introduced ELP’s efforts to document, preserve and revive endangered languages in various parts of the world.

    At that time, very little content on ELP’s website was available in languages other than English. Even the user interface was only partially translated. After the event, Shay and I discussed a project focusing on user-interface translation to make the website accessible to non-English speakers.

    Our team was made up of 13 professional translators and “localizers” from the Translation, Conference Interpreting and Localization programs at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey (MIIS). With excellent linguistic skills and knowledge of the localization workflow, our team was able to deliver translations into Chinese, German, Portuguese, Spanish and Russian.
      
    Throughout the process, our team worked closely with ELP’s project manager, Stephanie Walla and engineer, Lwin Moe to tackle technical challenges that we encountered in translating the website.

    It has been a memorable experience for all of us at MIIS, and an awesome opportunity to apply our translation and localization skills to a great project. We are excited to see our translations go live on the website, and hope more translators and localizers will join our effort.

    MIIS Team members:

    Linn Hu: Team Lead
    Katrin Liebert: German Project Coordinator
    Johannes Härtel: German Editor
    Verena Ritter: German Translator
    Isabelle Setti: Portuguese Project Coordinator
    Bruno Rossi: Portuguese Translator & Editor
    Olga Melnikoff: Russian Project Coordinator
    Penny Le: Chinese Project Coordinator
    Tingting Xu: Chinese Translator
    Lisa Li: Chinese Translator
    Wendy Zhou: Chinese Translator
    Sophie Yang: Chinese Translator
    Zihan Fan: Chinese Editor
    Roberto Koeneke: Spanish Project Coordinator 


    MIIS Team

  • Tuesday, April 21, 2015

    Endangered Languages Project Website – New and Improved!

    We’re pleased to announce the launch of the new and improved Endangered Languages Project website! Here are some of the new features we’re excited to share with you:

    1. New and improved browsing

    Our new browse by category feature makes finding information and resources concerning the world’s endangered languages much easier! For example, if you are interested in resources about language education you can filter your search to topics such as "curriculum design" or "immersion and language nest resources."

    You can also browse resources based on their format (audio, video, image, guide, document or link) and choose to view resources by newly added or most viewed. Our resources include information on anthropology, sociology, education, cognitive science, environmental science, public policy, and more and have been uploaded by users and researchers alike.

    2. Easier process for submitting materials

    With our new submission process, you can add resources by category and tag resources so that they can be easily searched. You can choose from existing tags such as "language advocacy" or "language teaching methods" or create your own!

    We are also happy to report that the Endangered Languages Project will be available in five additional languages later this spring!

    We’re very happy to bring you these new features and we hope that you will join us in this worldwide effort to share knowledge, resources and connect with others who are passionate about language conservation.

    Feel free to get in touch with us. We’d love to hear from you!

    With warm regards,

    The Endangered Languages Project team

  • Wednesday, March 11, 2015

    Minority languages in the digital world: Irish community experience with technology
    Contributed by Eoin P. Ó Murchú
    I was raised with Irish and English, attended an Irish speaking secondary school and studied some modules in Irish at third level. I have been interested in translation and crowdsourced translation for various online projects for some years now.
    Irish or Gaeilge is a minority language − it has state support, but this is often quite passive, and its use is in decline in traditional linguistic heartlands, though there might be hope for the language in urban settings. In our increasingly digital world, one of the big fears for less widely spoken languages is getting left behind. For example, the challenge of ‘voice to text’ is the next big thing, something in which Irish is lagging behind.
    I was asked to take part in the translation of the Gmail interface into Irish. A small community has built up to translate various digital resources into Irish. For Gmail we helped with the translation of 60,000 strings (and counting!) − words and phrases used in the Gmail interface. We divided up the work and set about translating the strings, sometimes with the help of machine translation, debating various terms, ensuring consistency and finally proofing for typographical errors.
    Having Gmail and other technologies available in Irish is a good way to show that the language has a value and a place in the modern world. It shows people that they can use it online and also helps to standardize technological terminology. It means that speakers can passively learn the language to a certain degree simply by switching their account to Irish, while fluent speakers can achieve a higher level of understanding and linguistic competency. As daily speakers of minority languages may have a lower level of reading or writing ability, this may help to bridge that gap.
    Though small, Google Search is also available in Irish, which is a visible and important thing. It says that Irish is still here and despite all the negative stories about the many challenges facing minority languages, Irish will have a role to play into the next century at least.
    We are currently translating Twitter into Irish but some common problems pop up as with Facebook – there is a lack of quality control as much of the content is volunteer-generated (though often expert) and there are challenges keeping up with massive amounts of updates. There are also problems with language community take-up − many people simply view it as easier or better to use the original English language version.
    It’s important to remember that we are merely passing the language on − our challenge is to not be left behind in an increasingly digital-based and hyper-connected world.
    For more information about this initiative, check out Use your cúpla focal on Gmail, now in Irish on the official Gmail blog!
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