-Soapy translations are not good language, says Åse Wetås of the Norwegian Language Council 

- Now we make use of the benefits from 50 years of Nordic cooperation. We are a large region with a distinctive trust between us, a common social system and a linguistic closeness that benefit us. 

CEO Åse Wetås of the Norwegian Language Council was happy that the Nordic Council of Ministers funded the conference where representatives from a broader Nordic region, including the Faroe Islands, Greenland and Northern Ireland gathered in Trondheim on November 5th and 6th to discuss Nordic languages and minority languages in the times of AI. 

The goal was to foster a shared understanding between the academics, policy makers, language councils and users of language technology on status and further goals. The report from ASTIN (the Workgroup for Language Technology in the Nordic Countries) on the take aways from the conference, is under way, not ready yet. 

Why this?

- But why is a meeting with lingvistics researchers and data scientists important, Åse Wetås? 
 
- We must work on all our languages and use modern technology to help us. We clearly see that modern technology based on English, like ChatGPT, doesn’t perform well on smaller languages. It is obvious for Nynorsk versus Bokmål. The generated language is often old-fashioned and far away from the Bokmål standard. Furthermore, translations from English are soapy smooth, they don’t cover professional areas well, she says, emphasizing the need for accuracy and reliability at language models to ensure trust when using them. 

Parrot translations

Åse Wetås says generated texts will characterize the narratives we  have of our own language in the future: 

- Then we can’t offer our youth Norwegian text based on texts written by our grandfathers and parrot translations from English.  We need quality data sets to get outcomes that works for the daily as well as for professional use, she says.  

- Are smaller languages doomed as language models need lots of data to perform well?

- We can’t afford to let go of our own control of our languages. It is a liberal value that also minorities are represented. A conference for sharing experiences will help us overcome challenges ahead, says Åse Wetås. 

A Nordic call

At the conference, Magnus Sahlgren from AI Sweden made a call for more Nordic collaboration to meet competition from outside. 

- Europe is lagging from a global perspective, and we, here in the Nordics, are lagging behind Europe due to the rapid developments taking place, said Magnus Sahlgren. 

He heads the Swedish NLU (Natural Language Understanding) that were the first in Scandinavia to launch models on a native language. His perspective is that AI will have an impact on most aspects of life and society, and we need to be up to speed. 
There is already substantial contact and cooperation between research centers and universities in the Nordic region, but Magnus Sahlgren called for more for four reasons:

- Shared competence is needed and there must be more funding for cutting egde research. Then of course high quality data must be available and necessary compute resources in place. 

Borealium

At the conference, a new language technology platform for small languages in the Nordics called Borealium was launched. It brings together language technology products, solutions and resources for small languages in the Nordics in an audience-friendly format.  

Reports on ongoing work for several small and minority languages was presented during the conference. We will return to the results of the conference when the official report is published. 

Published 2024-11-29

By: Rolf D. Svendsen