Translator: Alina Siluyanova Reviewer: Denise RQ
Good evening.
My company, Transparent Language, has developed unique technology
that we want to give away to people and organizations
that are working to save endangered languages
and the world's other under-supported languages.
According to the Ethnologue,
there are about
7,103 different living languages on Earth.
About a 100 of those get any significant attention
from the commercial world.
The other 7,000 are largely ignored,
and actually many of them are at risk of completely dying out,
doing a lot of social damage in the process.
Transparent Language would like to prevent that language loss,
but even more - as crazy as it sounds -
we would like to make it so that if somebody wants to learn
one of those 7,000 languages, they can.
So, how could you possibly do that?
I mean, how do you even find and connect
with so many dispersed and out-of-the-way language communities?
Our answer is the 7000 Languages Project.
There are people and organizations who know a lot
about these 7,000 languages and care about them.
Some care about all such languages,
some just about languages of a particular region,
or certain language family, some just about one language.
And the idea of the 7000 Languages Project
is to make available to all of these people and organizations,
at no charge,
a shared best of breed technology infrastructure
that will allow them to create and then disseminate
awesome, tech-enabled language learning materials;
materials that are specially designed for fast and reliable language learning,
and it will work on just about any computer, or tablet, or smartphone.
The learners then could be a community's own children and grandchildren,
who might be at risk of losing their own native language,
or the learners could be anyone, anywhere.
So, these students in Bali, Indonesia, are educated in Indonesian,
but they can also learn Balinese
using some compelling Balinese learning software
from the BASAbali 7000 Partnership.
These good women revel in speaking Ojibwe,
and they and their colleagues are making compelling
Ojibwe language learning software
as part of the Grassroots Indigenous Multimedia 7000 Partnership.
So, we think of the 7000 Languages Project
as having two big parts, the technology and the people,
and the Project is bringing them together.
The technology is the systems that allow someone to easily make
high quality language learning materials
for a language of no commercial interest.
The people are all these organizations, and advocates, and experts
who care about and know about
less-common languages and endangered languages.
The purpose of the Project
is to bring the people and the technology together
with energy and with sufficient support,
so that their work creating language learning materials
is successful.
And because there is no money associated with these languages,
it all has to be done free of charge.
The technology is one of the big pieces,
one of the two big things that you need to bring together
to have this project happen,
and that's why Transparent Language,
in particular, is doing the 7000 Languages Project.
We already have that technology,
we developed it for a different customer and a different purpose,
but we already have it,
and we bring this technology with us to the 7000 Languages Project.
So, Transparent Language's primary business
is inventing innovative technology and capability
to support the U.S. Government's
most rigorous and stringent language learning schools and programs;
programs that teach over a 100 languages,
and where the success of every student is critical.
The U.S. Government needs
many of its people to have strong language capability
in order to succeed at diplomacy, defense, humanitarian relief, science,
health, commerce, and on and on.
Sometimes, we hire people who have the languages,
but often we train our professionals in the languages they need.
Busy professionals have no time,
so we needed ways to train languages faster, much faster,
to train in half the time,
and Transparent Language develops the systems and the capability to do that.
We're not talking about just one little language course in each language,
like you might see on some TV ad for consumer software.
Our systems need to be able to efficiently create
effective technology support for every purpose of a language,
every course of instruction,
sometimes dozens of courses
for one language in a single organization.
Sometimes, in an extreme example, but one that happens regularly,
we need to suddenly create
lots of varieties of job-related language learning materials
with almost no notice, and create them immediately.
This is something that we call "language surge".
So, imagine, as we're here, some disaster occurs out in the world:
a flood or an earthquake, infectious disease outbreak.
So, you maybe remember the Haiti earthquakes of 2010,
the Pakistan floods that followed later in that year;
perhaps, the Pacific tsunami that hit Fukushima.
When something like that happens,
the eyes of the U.S. Military turn to that region,
and we begin moving people and material.
It's very impressive and inspiring.
And, as a part of that, hundreds of Americans or thousands
may suddenly need to learn a job-related language
in a language that yesterday they didn't know they would need.
So, here is the cool overlap between language surge,
which we think about as a part of our business,
and the 7000 Languages Project, which we do pro bono.
People who are working to save or invigorate some less-common language,
have almost exactly the same needs as a surge language team,
that is rapidly pumping out job-related language learning materials
to help responders.
The surge team is in much, much more of a hurry,
but they both need simple, clear, efficient systems
to create these language learning materials,
materials that are specifically designed
for faster and more reliable language learning,
and that will work on just about any device that you bring.
And that overlap of interests between these two
is really good news for the 7000 Languages' people.
Transparent Language, we are pleased, thrilled even
to take the systems we've developed for our paying customers
and provide them at no charge to the 7000 Language team.
We've done that with a lot of languages:
Ojibwe and Balinese, and many other languages;
our people love doing it.
The only problem is that we're a small company,
we can only work with a few language teams at a time.
So, to break that bottle neck
we invented the concept of the 7000 Partnership,
and the partnerships are the key to scaling up this work.
The 7000 Partnership is a company, or organization,
that cares about languages and that is willing to dedicate
some of its people to learning our systems,
learning how to train others in our systems
and then to work with them.
Now, the 7000 is young,
but we already have some great partnerships:
the National Council Of Less Commonly Taught Languages,
and they are NCOLCTL 7000 Partnership;
the Maryland Language Science Center,
and the Langscape 7000 Partnership, the BASAbali 7000 Partnership,
Grassroots Indigenous Multimedia 7000 Partnership,
The Manitoba First Nations, Kurdish Language and Culture;
one too new to be up there,
the Alpha Edge Western African Languages 7000 Partnership,
and we hope to have many more.
So, Transparent Language,
instead of directly supporting the language teams,
we support the partnership, and the partnership supports the team.
And this way, we hope to be able to help
thousands of languages, instead of the limited number
that we would have been able to support directly.
Losing a language
is like pulling out one more thread from the human tapestry.
It flattens our cultural landscape.
Losing a language can't be undone.
Saving a language saves an important part
of who we have been, and who we are.
It keeps us colorful, it keeps us strong.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)