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During the last 60 years, Europe has become a distinct political and economic structure. Culturally and linguistically it is rich and diverse. However, from Portuguese to Polish and Italian to Icelandic, everyday communication between Europe’s citizens, enterprises and politicians is inevitably confronted with language barriers. They are an invisible and increasingly problematic threat to economic growth as several recent studies.

Europe’s more than 80 languages are one of its richest and most important cultural assets, and a vital part of its unique social model. While languages such as English and Spanish are likely to thrive in the emerging digital marketplace, many European languages could become marginal in a networked society. This would weaken Europe’s global standing, and run counter to the goal of ensuring equal participation for every European citizen regardless of language. A recent UNESCO report on multilingualism states that languages are an essential medium for the enjoyment of fundamental rights, such as political expression, education and participation in society. From the very beginning, Europe had decided to keep its cultural and linguistic richness and diversity alive during the process of becoming an economic and political union. For maintaining the policy of multilingualism, the EU’s institutions spend about one billion Euros a year on translating texts and interpreting spoken communication. For all European economies the translation costs for compliance with the laws and regulations are much higher.

Networked computers are ubiquitous. They come in different shapes and forms (desktop, laptop, mobile phones, tablets, ebook readers, etc.) or are embedded in devices, objects, and systems such as, for example, cameras, washing machines, televisions, cars, heating systems, robots, traffic control systems. Software is usually available in multiple human languages. Global standardisation efforts such as Unicode solved the problem of representing and displaying different alphabets and special characters. Mobile devices and social media are reshaping how and when we communicate with one another using the tools and devices we use both in business and private life. The way we interact with computers is no longer restricted to graphical interfaces and keyboards, but it is being extended through touch screens, voice interfaces and dialogue systems, and mobile devices with accelerometers that tell the device how it is held by the user.

Answering the question on the current state of a whole R&D field is both difficult and complex. For language technology, even though partial answers exist in terms of business figures, scientific challenges and results from educational studies, nobody has collected these indicators and provided comparable reports for a substantial number of European languages yet. In order to arrive at a comprehensive answer, META-NET prepared the White Paper Series “Europe’s Languages in the Digital Age” that describes the current state of language technology support for 30 European languages. This immense undertaking has been in preparation since mid 2010 and was published in the summer of 2012. More than 200 experts from academia and industry participated to the 30 volumes as co-authors and contributors. White Papers were written for the following 30 European languages (including all 23 official EU languages): Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish, Swedish.

People communicate using the languages they have known since early childhood, yet computers remained ignorant of their users’ languages for a long time. It took many years until they could reliably handle scripts of languages other than English. It took even longer until computers could check the spelling of texts and read them aloud for the visually impaired. On the web we can now get rough translations and search for texts containing a word, even if the word occurs in a different form from the one we search. But when it comes to interpreting certain input and responding correctly, computers only “understand” simple artificial languages such as Java, C++ and HTML. In the next IT revolution computers will master our languages. Just as they already understand measurements and formats for dates and times, the operating systems of tomorrow will know human languages. They may not reach the linguistic performance of educated people and they will not yet know enough about the world to understand everything, but they will be much more useful than they are today and will further enhance our work and life.

For decades it has been obvious that one of the last remaining frontiers of IT is still separating our rapidly evolving technological world of mobile devices, computers and the internet from the most precious and powerful asset of mankind, the human mind, the only system capable of thought, knowledge and emotion. Although we use computers to write, telephones to chat and the web to search for knowledge, IT has no direct access to the meaning, purpose and sentiment behind our trillions of written and spoken words. This is why technology is unable to summarise a text, answer a question, respond to a letter and to translate reliably. In many cases it cannot even correctly pronounce a simple English sentence.

In this Strategic Research Agenda META-NET recommends setting up a large, multi-year programme on language technologies to build the technological foundations for a truly multilingual Europe. We suggest to concentrate future efforts in this field on three priority research themes: Tran lingual Cloud; Social Intelligence and e-Participation; Socially-Aware Interactive Assistants. We also suggest to concentrate on two additional themes. On the one hand there is the overarching issue of researching and further developing core language resources and base technologies that are needed by the three priority themes and that, for many of Europe’s languages, do not exist yet. On the other, we recommend to design and to implement the European Language Technology Platform as a means to collect and to offer all language technology-related applications and services, designed and built in Europe for the European citizen.