Your language isn’t in the dropdown menu. Speech recognition doesn’t understand it. Translation tools barely exist. When commercial providers don’t see a market, language communities can take the lead in building the digital tools they need.
So what can they do themselves, and what could they do together?
That’s what DIGI-RLF is trying to find out. This Interreg Italy–Switzerland project brings together researchers and institutions from three closely related Rhaeto-Romance language communities: Romansh, Ladin and Friulian. Rather than solving the same problems independently, they’re looking at how they can share expertise, build on each other’s work and make use of open technologies and infrastructure such as CLARIN and Unicode CLDR.
This isn’t just about three languages. In multilingual South Tyrol, these challenges are close to home, but the discussion goes well beyond the region. We want to hear from people working with other minority and under-resourced languages, developers of open-source speech and translation tools, and anyone facing similar challenges.
What can realistically be shared? What needs local adaptation? And who keeps the tools running when project funding ends?
After a short introduction to DIGI-RLF, we’ll open the floor for a moderated discussion, aiming to identify shared resources, open problems and opportunities to collaborate beyond the conference.
Bring your projects, technical challenges and unfinished ideas, and let’s find out what we could build together.
