Linguistic Diversity on the Internet: Assessment of the Contribution of Machine Translation

Estudo 01-05-2000

The objectives of this study have been to assess both the problems created and the opportunities offered by the Internet for the smaller and minority languages of the European Union; to consider what measures might facilitate the maximal use by European citizens of their own languages for communication and the accessing and presentation of information on the Internet; and to consider in particular the role which machine translation might play. The study finds that the threat to linguistic diversity on the Internet will not in the future come from the dominance of one language but from a multilingualism limited to perhaps half a dozen main world languages between which machine translation will be fully developed to the exclusion of the great majority of languages. It argues that the development of language technology for all European languages is not only essential from the point of view of citizenship and avoiding social exclusion, but can give Europe an important technology cluster. The weakest language-groups in the EU, while found to be making enterprising use of the Internet, need a basic IT environment in their languages. A larger number of languages which lack the full array of language resources - linguistic corpora, electronic dictionaries etc - are in danger of being excluded not from the Internet as it is now, but from many of the processes, including machine translation and other language processing functions, that will increasingly be carried out over the Internet. There is a need for a much enhanced investment in language resources. Machine translation can only be understood in relation to the availability of the above-mentioned language resources. It is not one process which succeeds or fails by a single absolute standard, but a range of systems with different costs and advantages and suited to different user requirements. The study surveys the field, in respect of the uses of MT on the Internet, and particularly with the costs/benefits to the sm