European Parliament endorses the report on Language Equality in the Digital Age (2018-09-11)

This week, the report on Language Equality in the Digital Age that was presented by Jill Evans MEP of Wales was overwhelmingly endorsed by the European Parliament with 592 MEPs voting in favour, and with only 45 against and 44 abstentions.  Find here a link to a press release about the vote: https://www.greens-efa.eu/en/article/press/victory-for-language-equality-in-the-european-parliament/

CONGRATULATIONS!

https://youtu.be/MqRBloVr5N4

The report endorsed by EuroParl

It is not a law, but it is a declaration made by the European Parliament, which can be a guiding reference for all countries. Today, as until now there were no laws or declarations of the European Parliament to protect the low resourced languages, everything remains in the hands of the local legislation of each country, which could without problems ignore these languages. It is not a law, but this Europarl report is a step forward.

Jill Evans MEP said:

• “I am pleased that the European Parliament agrees with my view that action needs to be taken to address the digital gap between European languages.
• “European citizens must be able to access and use the digital world in their own languages, including in minority languages. This will require investment and leadership at the EU level.
• “This is a huge opportunity for the EU to demonstrate a real commitment to language equality, for the speakers of all of Europe’s languages, including Welsh.”

The report calls on the EU to:

• improve the institutional frameworks for language technology policies,
• create new research policies to increase the use of language technology in Europe,
• use education policies in order to secure the future of language equality in the digital age,
• increase the support for both private companies and public bodies to make better use of language technologies.

Last January, Maite Melero representing Catalan, Delith Prys representing Welsh, and Iñaki Irazabalbeitia and Kepa Sarasola representing Basque participated in the creation of the first draft of the report.

A conference with the same title Language equality in the digital age will be held on september 27th in the European Parliament to show to the MEPs the opportunities this technology is offering to European languages.  Jill Evans, Maite Melero, Delith Prys and our colleague Montse Maritxalar from Ixa Group are going to participate. (See here the schedule)