Languages: English and Irish are both offical languages laid down in the Constitution, with Irish qualified as "national and first language". However, Irish is a minority language in Ireland, spoken only by ~36%. Ireland did not sign and ratify the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages.
Language Strategies: The objective of Government policy in relation to the Irish is detailed in the 20-Year Strategy for the Irish Language 2010-2030: to increase the use and knowledge of Irish as a community language. The part on ICT includes language technology issues and corpora; speech technology, speech synthesis, and speech recognition that are spelled out explicitly.
Language technologies: With regard to Public Services related to automatic translation: In 2014, the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht (DAHG) entered into an Agreement with the Centre for Global Intelligent Content at Dublin City University aimed at developing a statistic-based machine translation (MT) system for use by the Department’s staff translators. Following from the success of this pilot project, a new Agreement has been entered into with the same organisation for the system to go fully operational within the Department and for it to be further refined during 2015. In tandem with this, the Department is funding research by Trinity College Dublin into the development of a rule-based MT System with the medium-term aim of amalgamating the two systems in order to achieve maximum efficiencies. The development of these systems forms an integral part of an overall plan to establish a shared Irish Language translation service for the Irish civil Service.
There are also nationally funded projects with regard to LT and MT in Irish: The abair.ie project originated from the university research project Cabóigín I. The project's goal was to develop a full-fledged Text-to-Speech synthesis system for Irish and was funded by Foras na Gaeilge.
Foclóir na Nua-Ghaeilge: English-Irish Dictionary, launched in January 2013. The dictionary is available free of charge, and has been adapted to work both on desktop computers and on mobile devices. As well as translations for the English content, the dictionary also contains grammatical information and sound files.
National Terminology Database for Irish (Tearma): Developed by Fiontar, DCU in collaboration with An Coiste Téarmaíochta, Foras na Gaeilge.
Future National Policies and Strategies: It is now recognised that a long term plan is required in order to properly develop the sector of LT and MT for Irish. The Department of Arts, Heritage and Gaeltacht is in the process of drafting a 10 Year Digital Plan for the Irish Language. The publication is scheduled for late Autumn 2015. The specialist areas proposed include: Modelling for Speech Technology, Syntactic, Lexical and Semantic Resources, Natural Language Understanding, Speech Synthesis and Text-to-Speech, Speech Recognition, Dialogue Systems, Machine Translation, Information Retrieval, Speech and Language Applications for State and Public use.
Irish LR Stakeholders (LTO Directory)
Irish LR Policy Makers (LTO Directory)
Other Relevant Organisation:
The Department of Arts, Heritage and Gaeltacht: Government Dept. with responsibility for language matters,
Údarás na Gaeltacht: The state body responsibility for the linguistic, economic and cultural development of the Gaeltacht.
