Home | Technical Responses to 
Multilingual Issues (Summary)
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FUTURE AGENDA

• Provision of machine translation for minority languages, especially those spoken by minorities, not just the major state languages of Europe.

• Improved provision for immigrant communities along the lines of Denmark’s Indvandrerbiblioteket, especially where immigrant community are well dispersed throughout society and not concentrated in particular communities, making local provision uneconomic.

• Voice to Voice translation. At the moment Voice to Voice translation, that is, a machine which translates spoken language from one language to another, is science fiction. Such a device would involve the perfection of a number of complex technologies, each of which at present has many shortcomings including:

  • Voice recognition i.e. a machine which accurately converts spoken language to written text.

  • Machine translation i.e. a machine which translates text from one language to another.

  • Text back to speech.

Commercial speech recognition software which converts speech to text is available but the results are not yet satisfactory. 95% accurate means 5% inaccurate or 5 mistakes in every 100 words (e.g. 20 in this paragraph). The shortcomings of text-to-text machine translation have already been discussed: for machine translation to have any chance of working, input to it must be perfect and all voice recognition software generates errors. Text can be converted to speech with some success; this is the only part of the requisite technology which is as yet in an adequate condition.

LINKS

Denmark
Danish Central Library for Immigrant Literature (Indvandrerbiblioteket)
Set up to deal with the cultural needs of quite recent immigrants and contains over 146,000 items in a total of about 100 languages. Collections are maintained in about 50 languages.
www.indvandrerbiblioteket.dk

Finland
Multicultural Library (MCL)
A Nordic joint venture since 1996, housed by Helsinki but financed jointly by Helsinki and Oslo, to make their multicultural services available to minorities etc. through the Internet. www.lib.hel.fi/mcl

Helsinki City Library
Multilingual Library Service run by the City of Helsinki but financed by a grant from the Finnish government for the purpose of providing services, including interlending, to linguistic minorities in Finland.
www.lib.hel.fi/ulkkirja/ english.html

Norway
Deichman Library, Oslo
Has books in 37 languages. Its brief is to provide Norway’s public libraries with informed advice about the needs of immigrants and refugees and to be a purchasing, interlending and cataloguing centre for literature in foreign languages. It is 75% state-funded.
http://nyhuus.deich.folkebibl.no

Spain
There are a very good examples of bilingual websites in the Autonomous Communities of Basque Country, Catalonia and Galicia, regions in which part of the native population has always been bilingual.
http://bibliotecaforal.bizkaia.net/ Catalan
http://www.bcn.es/bibliotecageneral/cas/eindex.html Basque

Sweden
The Kurdish Library, Stockholm
Supported by the Swedish government and the City of Stockholm ministering to the needs of the city’s Kurdish community.
www.kurdishlibrary.org

Stockholm’s International Library or Internationella Biblioteket
Financed by Stockholm’s City Council contains 200,000 books in 125 languages. The service is not specifically aimed at immigrants but the list of languages undoubtedly includes those spoken by Sweden’s immigrant communities.
www.ssb.stockholm.se/inva/ilc.htm

Sweden/Norway
Nordic Book mobile co-operation in Lapland
The Muonio municipality book mobile also visits municipalities in Sweden (Kiruna) and Norway (Kautokeino). It is a co-operation between the three municipalities. The book mobile has a collection in Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian and Sami languages.
http://www.muonio.fi/kirjasto/kirjastoauto.html

United Kingdom
CILLA
Co-operative of Indic Library Language Authorities is a professional library service for Indic languages especially Urdu, Gujarati, Hindi, Punjabi, Tamil, Bengali. The service includes specialised advice, a union catalogue, an approvals service. It has recently been taken over by OCLC.
www.swrls.org.uk/National.htm

Conway County Borough Council
Has a public library web-site with a bilingual catalogue. The site offers two ways of searching the catalogue: Welsh and English. The catalogue itself is bilingual because of the need to catalogue Welsh books in Welsh and English books in English for a bilingual readership.
www.conwy.gov.uk

Edinburgh City Libraries’ Ethnic Library Service
Includes material in Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Gujarati, Hindi, Punjabi and Urdu and is staffed by people who can speak ethnic minority languages. Word processing is offered in Bengali, Chinese and Urdu.
www.edinburgh.gov.uk/Libraries (pick “Collections and Publications” from the menu).

Plymouth Library Services
Maintain an online list of translators, searchable by language
http://www.webopac.plymouth.gov.uk/cgi-bin/community_2000.sh?enqtype=TRANS&e

Home | Technical Responses to 
Multilingual Issues (Summary)
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