The Romanian Language in the Digital Age — Executive Summary
During the last 60 years, Europe has become a distinct political and economic structure. Culturally and linguistically it is rich and diverse. However, from Portuguese to Polish and Italian to Icelandic, everyday communication between Europe’s citizens, within business and among politicians is inevitably confronted with language barriers. The EU's institutions spend about a billion euros a year on maintaining their policy of multilingualism, i.e., translating texts and interpreting spoken communication. Does this have to be such a burden? Language technology and linguistic research can make a significant contribution to removing the linguistic borders. Combined with intelligent devices and applications, language technology will help Europeans talk and do business together even if they do not speak a common language.
Information technology changes our everyday lives. We typically use computers for writing, editing, calculating, and information searching, and increasingly for reading, listening to music, viewing photos and watching movies. We carry small computers in our pockets and use them to make phone calls, write emails, get information and entertain ourselves, wherever we are. How does this massive digitization of information, knowledge and everyday communication affect our language? Will our language change or even disappear?
All our computers are linked together into an increasingly dense and powerful global network. The girl in Buenos Aires, the customs officer in Constanța and the engineer in Kathmandu can all chat with their friends on Facebook, but they are unlikely ever to meet one another in online communities and forums. If they are worried about how to treat earache, they will all check Wikipedia to find out all about it, but even then they won’t read the same article. When Europe's netizens discuss the effects of the Fukushima nuclear accident on European energy policy in forums and chat rooms, they do so in cleanly-separated language communities. What the internet connects is still divided by the languages of its users. Will it always be like this?
In science fiction movies, everyone speaks the same language. Could it be Romanian, even though we only had one Romanian astronaut? Many of the world’s 6,000 languages will not survive in a globalized digital information society. It is estimated that at least 2,000 languages are doomed to extinction in the decades ahead. Others will continue to play a role in families and neighbourhoods, but not in the wider business and academic world. What are the Romanian language’s chances of survival?
Spoken by approx. 29.000.000 worldwide, the Romanian language is not only present through books, films or TV stations, but also in the digital information space. The internet market is in a continuous growth in Romania. Ever more Romanians have a computer with internet connection at home. The top level domain .ro is used by 0.4% of all the websites, similar to the .eu domain.
The Romanian language features a set of particularities that contributes to the language richness, but can also be a challenge to the computational processing of Romanian.
The automated translation and speech processing tools currently available on the market fall short of the envisaged goals. The dominant actors in the field are primarily privately-owned for-profit enterprises based in Northern America. As early as the late 1970s, the EU realised the profound relevance of language technology as a driver of European unity, and began funding its first research projects, such as EUROTRA. At the same time, national projects were set up that generated valuable results, but never led to a concerted European effort. In contrast to these highly selective funding efforts, other multilingual societies such as India (22 official languages) and South Africa (11 official languages) have set up long-term national programmes for language research and technology development.
There are some complaints about the ever-increasing use of Anglicisms, and some linguists even fear that the Romanian language will become riddled with English words and expressions. But our study suggests that this is misguided.
Analogue to the re-latinisation phase in the 19th century after the liberation from the Greek and Turkish domination, Romanian language was passing in the last 20 years through a process of transformation from the totalitarian usage (“langue de bois”, unidirectional discourse, etc.) to an open usage in which new linguistic patterns must adapt to the social and cultural transition. Therefore, similar to many other languages, Romanian is going through a continuous process of internationalisation under the influence of the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary.
Our main concern should not be the gradual Anglicisation of our language, but its complete disappearance from major areas of our personal lives. Not science, aviation and the global financial markets, which actually need a world-wide lingua franca. We mean the many areas of life in which it is far more important to be close to a country’s citizens than to international partners – domestic policies, for example, administrative procedures, the law, culture and shopping.
Information and communication technology are now preparing for the next revolution. After personal computers, networks, miniaturisation, multimedia, mobile devices and cloud-computing, the next generation of technology will feature software that understands not just spoken or written letters and sounds but entire words and sentences, and supports users far better because it speaks, knows and understands their language. Forerunners of such developments are the free online service Google Translate that translates between 57 languages, IBM's supercomputer Watson that was able to defeat the US-champion in the game of “Jeopardy”, and Apple's mobile assistant Siri for the iPhone that can react to voice commands and answer questions in English, German, French and Japanese.
The next generation of information technology will master human language to such an extent that human users will be able to communicate using the technology in their own language. Devices will be able to automatically find the most important news and information from the world's digital knowledge store in reaction to easy-to-use voice commands. Language-enabled technology will be able to translate automatically or assist interpreters; summarise conversations and documents; and support users in learning scenarios.
The next generation of information and communication technologies will enable industrial and service robots (currently under development in research laboratories) to faithfully understand what their users want them to do and then proudly report on their achievements.
This level of performance means going way beyond simple character sets and lexicons, spell checkers and pronunciation rules. The technology must move on from simplistic approaches and start modelling language in an all-encompassing way, taking syntax as well as semantics into account to understand the drift of questions and generate rich and relevant answers.
In the case of the Romanian language, research in universities and academia from Romania and the Republic of Moldova was successful in designing particular high quality software, as well as models and theories widely applicable. However, the scope of the resources and the range of tools are still very limited when compared to English, and they are simply not sufficient in quality and quantity to develop the kind of technologies required to support a truly multilingual knowledge society. However, it is nearly impossible to come up with sustainable and standardised solutions given the current relatively low level of linguistic resources.
A legally unclear situation restricts the usage of digital texts, such as those published online by newspapers, for empirical linguistics and language technology research, for example, to train statistical language models. Together with politicians and policy makers, researchers should try to establish laws or regulations that enable researchers to use publicly available texts for language-related R & D activities.
Finally, there is a lack of continuity in research and development funding. Short-term coordinated programmes tend to alternate with periods of sparse or zero funding. The need for large amounts of data and the extreme complexity of language technology systems makes it vital to develop an infrastructure and a coherent research financing and organisation to spur greater sharing and cooperation.
Summing up, we can safely consider that for now, the Romanian language is not in danger. However, the whole situation could change dramatically when a new generation of technologies really starts to master human languages effectively. Through improvements in machine translation, language technology will help in overcoming language barriers, but it will only be able to operate between those languages that have managed to survive in the digital world. If there is adequate language technology available, then it will be able to ensure the survival of languages with very small populations of speakers. If not, even “larger” languages will come under severe pressure.
Drawing on the insights gained so far, today’s hybrid language technology mixing deep processing with statistical methods should be able to bridge the gap between all European languages and beyond. But as this series of white papers shows, there is a dramatic difference between Europe's member states in terms of both the maturity of the research and in the state of readiness with respect to language solutions.
META-NET’s vision is high-quality language technology for all languages that supports political and economic unity through cultural diversity. This technology will help tear down existing barriers and build bridges between Europe’s languages. This requires all stakeholders – in politics, research, business, and society – to unite their efforts for the future.
This white paper series complements the other strategic actions taken by META-NET (see the appendix for an overview). Up-to-date information such as the current version of the META-NET vision paper or the Strategic Research Agenda (SRA) can be found on the META-NET website: http://www.meta-net.eu.
