Publikation
Cracking the Language Barrier for a Multilingual Europe
Georg Rehm
In: Pirkko Nuolijärvi; Gerhard Stickel (Hrsg.). Language Use in Public Administration -- Theory and practice in the European states. Contributions to the Annual Conference 2015 of EFNIL in Helsinki. Annual Conference of EFNIL, October 7-9, Helsinki, Finland, ISBN 978-963-9074-65-1, Research Institute for Linguistics Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 2016.
Zusammenfassung
A truly multilingual Europe that is realised and supported through sophisticated monolingual, cross-lingual and
multilingual language technologies (LT) is still far from being a reality. Since its inception in 2010, it has been the
key objective of META-NET to foster and stimulate research and technology development towards this scenario.
Important milestones along the way have been the publication of the Language White Papers (Rehm and Uszkoreit,
2012, Rehm et al., 2014) and Strategic Research Agenda for Multilingual Europe 2020 (Rehm and Uszkoreit,
2013) as well as the deployment of META-SHARE (Piperidis, 2012, Piperidis et al., 2014). While all these activities
did have a certain amount of impact in various European countries (Rehm et al., 2016), new challenges but
also new opportunities have been emerging in the last two years.
In this contribution we briefly report on the most recent developments in and around META-NET until the
end of 2015. After an overview of META-NET in Section 2, we briefly describe, in Section 3, one of the major
challenges, i. e., the danger of continued community fragmentation. In Section 4 we report on the relationship
between the EU’s Digital Single Market flagship initiative and language technologies, which is one of the major
challenges but also opportunities our field has in the next couple of years. A milestone of 2015 was the Riga
Summit 2015, which also included META-FORUM 2015 (Section 5). At this event, the very first version of
the Strategic Agenda for the Multilingual Digital Single Market was presented (Section 6). As a direct followup
action of the Riga Summit 2015, the new European initiative Cracking the Language Barrier was created as a
federation of projects and organisations working on technologies for a multilingual Europe. Section 7 provides
an overview of the initiative, its setup and members as well as the topics and objectives of the collaboration.