Under the presidency of José Luis Soro, Councillor of the Council of Spatial Planning, Mobility and Housing of the Government of Aragon, held yesterday in Zaragoza, within the European project LINGUATEC, a workshop of experiences of digitization of minority languages. The meeting was attended by 6 Basque, French and Spanish entities, including the head of the Language and Technology unit of Elhuyar, Josu Aztiria. Also present at the meeting were the Director General of Linguistic Policy of Aragon, Ignacio López Susín, and the Managing Director of Tourism of Aragon, Jorge Marqueta.

As Soso said, “the goal is to have an Aragonese dictionary and a translator on the net”. This European project “aims to apply digitization to minority languages”, said Soro, who said that “this day has allowed us to know the digitization of Occitan and Basque”.

The EFA 227/16/LINGUATEC project “Development of cross-border cooperation and knowledge transfer in language technologies” aims to develop, demonstrate and disseminate innovative language resources, tools and applications that improve the level of digitization of Aragonese, Basque and Occitan. To do this it has a consortium formed by 6 entities:

1. ELHUYAR Foundation
2. Permanent Congress of Lenga Occitana
3. University of the Basque Country
4. CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)- DELEGATION REGIONALE MIDIPYRENEES
5. EUSKALTZAINDIA
6. Promotion and management of Aragonese Tourism, S.L.U.

Cross-border cooperation will enable the transfer of knowledge and the development of language solutions with market potential, as well as the benefit for language professionals, public access to multilingual content and progress in the development of a cross-border cluster of language technologies.

Thanks to the collaboration of the 6 partners of the project, the following results are expected:

• A roadmap for the digitization of Aragonese

• 5 new language resources (Occitan: monolingual and bilingual Occitan lexicon/other languages), morphosyntactic and syntactic analysis; Basque: vocal recognition

• 8 language tools developed or improved (occitan, aragonese and Basque vocal synthesis of Iparralde; occitan textual detector and occitan variants; improvement of French-Occitan, Spanish-Basque, Spanish-Aragonese automatic translations).

• Development of 6 innovative applications: downloadable machine translation bar for websites; CMS machine translation application; machine translation application between Pyrenean languages; Unified Basque Digital Manual; Aragonese Online Dictionary; multilingual semantic web browser.

• An agreement between universities and companies for the commercialization of solutions.

The EFA227/16/LINGUATEC project was approved in the second POCTEFA call, with a budget of 1.227.500 euros, of which 65% is financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) through the Interreg V-A Spain-France-Andorra program (POCTEFA 2014-2020). POCTEFA aims to strengthen the economic and social integration of the Spain-France-Andorra border area. This assistance is aimed at the development of cross-border economic, social and environmental activities through joint strategies for sustainable territorial development.