This is an abbreviated transcript of a talk I gave at a British-Irish Council conference on language technology in indigenous, minority and lesser-used languages in Dublin earlier this month (November 2015) under the title ‘Do minority languages need the same language technology as majority languages?’ I wanted to bust the myth that machine translation is necessary for the revival of minority languages. What I had to say didn’t go down well with some in the audience, especially people who work in machine translation (unsurprisingly). So beware, there is controversy ahead!

For better of worse, publicly available machine translation has been with us for some time now, thanks mainly to Google Translate and Microsoft’s Bing Translator. While the output is sometimes so bad it makes people react with laughter and anger and everything in between, machine translation is undeniably useful if used responsibly and for the right purpose. So far so good. But the question I want to ask here is, do minority languages such as Irish, Welsh and Scottish Gaelic need machine translation technology as much as majority languages such as English and French do? More.

See: Young, Single, Multilingual

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