The Third European Language Resource Coordination (ELRC) workshop in Bulgaria will take place on 24th November 2022. The event is organised jointly by the Ministry of Transport and Communications (MTC) and the Institute for Bulgarian Language (IBL), Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (BAS) within the European Language Resource Coordination (ELRC) project.
The aim of the project is to identify and collect appropriate language resources in all official languages of the European Union and the languages of the states associated with the Connecting Europe Facility for the purpose of the machine translation platform eTranslation. The machine translation platform is provided by the European Commission aiming to support the development of a real multilingual digital single market by enabling communication, exchange of documents and other language content between the public administrations of the European countries, as well as between the administrations, citizens and companies of the EU countries. Facilitating access to information in different languages can bring significant benefits to both the economy and society. The service is open for all public administrations, and from mid-2020 also for representatives of small and medium-sized enterprises, universities, as well as for participants in projects funded by the Connecting Europe Facility.
Since 2015, Bulgaria has participated actively in the project, promoting machine translation and language technologies. The language resources provided by the public administration have been used to improve the eTranslation machine translation platform. The quality of machine translation is related to the quality and quantity of language resources used to “train” the translation system. This means that Bulgarian language resources are essential for improving translations to and from Bulgarian in various thematic domains.
In 2016, the First National European Language Resource workshop was held, and in October 2018, the Second National Workshop took place, which was attended by more than 140 participants from the administration of the President of the Republic of Bulgaria, the National Assembly, the Council of Ministers, 17 ministries, 17 agencies, commissions, state agencies and institutes, the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, the academic community, companies in the field of professional translation, information and language technologies, publishing, etc.
The Third National Workshop on European Language Resource Coordination aims to raise awareness of the importance of language data collected and stored by public administration, as well as the benefits of sharing it.
During the event, experts from the European Commission (DG for Communication Networks, Content and Technologies and the DG for Translations), representatives of the public administration (Council of Ministers, Ministry of e-Government, National Institute of Justice, National Revenue Agency, etc.), of companies providing language services, as well as specialists in the field of language technologies will share their experience and good practices in the field of language technologies, language data management and storage and the use of the European Commission’s machine translation tool.
The working language is Bulgarian with simultaneous interpreting from Bulgarian to English and vice versa. An advance registration for the event is required.
