Within the ELE project three complementary online surveys were designed and implemented to consult the Language Technology (LT) community with regard to the current state of play and the future situation in about 2030 in terms of Digital Language Equality (DLE). While Chapters 4 and 38 provide a general overview of the community consultation methodology and the results with regard to the current situation as of 2022, this chapter summarises the results concerning the future situation in 2030. All of these results have been taken into account for the specification of the project’s Strategic Research, Innovation and Implementation Agenda (SRIA) and Roadmap for Achieving Full DLE in Europe by 2030.
This chapter presents the results of an extensive empirical investigation of the digital readiness of European languages, and provides a snapshot of the support they are offered through technology as of 2022. The degree of digital readiness was assessed on the basis of the availability of language resources and technologies for each language under investigation and a cross-language comparison was performed. As a complementary approach, the perspectives and opinions of LT users, developers and the regular citizen were acquired in order to fully understand the EU’s LT landscape. Both the objective empirical findings and the voice of the community clearly indicate that there is an extreme imbalance across languages when it comes to the individual levels of technological support. Although the LT field as a whole has demonstrated remarkable progress during the last decade, this progress is not equally evidenced across all languages, posing, more acutely than ever before, a threat of digital extinction for many of Europe’s lesser supported languages.
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