Press Releases

I am very happy to be here with you in the lovely city of Amsterdam and to have the opportunity to exchange experiences and views regarding our common goal, the future of digitization of languages in Europe.         

Just a couple of words about who we are: The Press and information Office is the Government Communication Agency. We deliver Communication Services to the Government and Information Services to the public, while using interpersonal, non-verbal, visual, oral and written means of dissemination.

On behalf of the Press and Information Office of Cyprus, I can only say that it was a real pleasure and a great satisfaction organizing the 2^nd ELRC Workshop in Cyprus in December 2018, in cooperation with the EC-Representation in Cyprus and the University of Cyprus. The main purpose of the workshop was to further inform the different governmental and non-governmental agents in Cyprus about the work of the ELRC. The ultimate aim of the European Commission Translation DG though, was to promote linguistic digitization and the creation a general discussion on Cyprus’ position in this multilingual environment.

Regarding the background of the Cypriot Public Services’ involvement in the ELRC:

• Since the Press and Information Office’s involvement in the ELRC work in 2018, we have been able to contribute a large amount of data to the depository, beginning by submitting 400.000 words before the Workshop and last month, another 193.514 words in the form of Greek and English press releases. I believe that a load of about 700.000 words is an important step forward and a significant corner stone in our common goal, the language data collection.

At this point, I would also like to refer to the On-site training offered by the ERLC which took place during the same time at our Offices in Cyprus and express my warmest thanks to the ELRC Consortium, but especially to Mr Papavassiliou and Mr Prokopides, the 2 experts from Greece who conducted the valuable training to my team of officers and technology personnel, on the methods of processing multilingual textual data.

Back at the ELRC workshop.  And allow me to quote the EC’s Deputy Director-General for Translation, Mr Ellinidis, who was a main speaker, “until today, the language resources in Greek are second in line of success among 36 data collections exchanged within the ELRC, with only 3 of them originating from Cyprus, all provides by the Press and Information Office)”. For that, as PIO we are proud. As a country, we can do better…

• But since I am quoting the Director General, please allow me to refer to another personal initiative of his, which resulted to an event in Nicosia on the 5^th of March, namely, the handover of 50 translations of the Epic Books of Homer, “Odyssey” and “Iliad” in 24 EU-languages - and Turkish - by the European Commission’s Directorate for Translation to the brand new Library of the University of Cyprus. An actual example of parallel translation of the original ancient Greek text, an example to be followed by us so many thousands of years after. We also had a reading of various Iliad Verses by 16 EU member-state ambassadors and one reading in our very distinct local “topolalia”, the Greek Cypriot dialect. And I can let you in the secret of trying to enter the event in the Guinness book of records as the most multi-lingual simultaneous narration of any ancient poetry text.

Going back to the ELRC Workshop, a very positive environment has been created right after and we are building a sustainable network of contact persons throughout the public sector. 

One more outcome of the Cyprus Workshop is that we, as a national coordinator for open language data collection, begun a close cooperation with the Cyprus Open Data Portal and its affiliated network of public sector representatives from the national administration bodies and we expect to start receiving linguistic data in the near future.

Dear friends,

When we talk about multilingualism and the importance of breaking down language barriers within the EU, we need to stress the need of prevention of the digital extinction of smaller languages. I would like thus to refer to the European Parliament vote of 11 September 2018 on language equality which stresses the importance of promoting the digitization of smaller and minority languages in order to avoid digital extinction.

The fact that our language, Greek, is a smaller language, not by age or by richness by any means, but definitely by the number of people it is spoken by, gives us one more reason to contribute to eTranslation. To facilitate the communication of national public services and citizens from countries with under-resourced languages, just like ours.

As the government Communication Authority, it is our job to provide our citizens with   the best possible information, both quantitative and qualitative. And this communication can only be maximized through languages by bridging the gap between widely used and less spoken languages. With our active contribution to the ELRC, we want Cyprus to be amongst the protagonists in this valuable effort for digitization of European languages thus promoting the digitization of the under-resourced Greek language.

CEF e-Translation is a significant tool in making digital public services multilingual and contributing to “Language Equality in the digital era”. Together with the EU’s commitment to promote under-resourced languages in the digital era, gave us the push we needed to submit an application for the open CEF-Automated Translation Call 2019 focusing on the Collaborative language resource projects for the provision of language resources to CEF AT through ELRC-SHARE.

As regards to the future contribution of Cyprus in the ELRC, it is important to stress that a plethora of language data can be identified within the public services with monolingual and bilingual content which can be a useful contribution to machine translation in multilingual services, such as e-Commerce and e-Government. Therefore, I believe that a direct communication channel in the member-states from which the ELRC can directly draw officially acquired language data, is worth giving a thought…

Our priorities in the Cyprus Action Plan for Cyprus:

• Establishing synergies with national agents in projects and initiatives, closer cooperation with The Open Data Portal and the Unit for Administrative Reform.
• Broadening of resources with the addition of speech data, data for Artificial Intelligence and other types of LRs to textual resources. Financial and technological assistance being essential.
• Language data integration is underway, since the PIO and the Open Data Portal Administration, we work in close cooperation towards our National open data policy and digital agenda.
• The establishment of a National Data Baseis essential in order to share the benefits of linguistic data collection
• Machine Translation System: we are looking forward to more information on NEC TM systems and their role in the future of language data collection.
• Data management practices: since only last week, on the 8^th of March to be exact, we have passed our law on certified translators, after it has been approved by the Parliament, we are now working on the system which helps to acquire language data from translations outsourced to external translators and/or executed by Certified Translators, including of course the management of confidential and personal data.
• The need to emphasize the role of digital texts in the digital economy (text as capital) is I believe indeed a priority and could be tackled with the introduction of the NEC TM systems, in due time.

Ladies and gentlemen,

Meetings like this, workshops and tech meetings in the field of Automated Translation like Neural Translation as well as the technical tools leading to automization and digitization of languages, provide all of us with the edification, the technical knowhow, but most importantly the drive to go on.

To work more and harder towards our goal. Which is no other than to communicate. Communicate with each other now, but also with the generations who came before us and the generations ahead. Through digitalized history. Through e-culture. Through distance-learning.  Through technology. Through each other and shared experiences.  But mainly, through our own language.

Dear friends,

Once again, I thank you for the invitation to this meeting, while my team and I personally, look forward to hosting you back in our, unfortunately still occupied and divided island, our beautiful Cyprus, for a future ELRC conference.

Thank you for your attention.

(NA/ML/SCH)