Abstract

Irish, a low-resourced lesser-used language, is striving to punch above its weight when it comes to some of the digital language tools and resources available to its users. High-tech language tools and resources for Irish are being developed in a number of universities in Ireland and elsewhere, in language technology areas relating to search, parsing, proofing, speech, translation, etc. (Judge at al., 2012). This paper aims to highlight work done by researchers at Fiontar, Dublin City University (DCU), to make a number of valuable Irish-language terminological, lexicographical, onomastic, and folkloristic data stocks more readily accessible, usable, and manageable using web and database technologies. Tools built with these technologies have facilitated the re-organisation, distributed development, and more widespread dissemination of these data stocks, as well as the creation of new data stocks. These language tools, which are on a par with tools that are available to users of well-resourced languages (take for example the online interface of the multilingual terminology database of the European Union, IATE: http://iate.europa.eu/), are now enabling Irish language users, language professionals, and linguists operate in an environment similar to that of their major language counterparts. The public interfaces of all Irish-language tools and resources developed by Fiontar are made available at http://www.gaois.ie/.

Highlights

  • Irish is a low-resourced language, the Irish Government’s 20 Year Strategy for the Irish Language, which prioritises the “promotion and protection” of the language (Government of Ireland, 2010), has brought about investment in the creation of digital language tools and resources

  • This paper highlights the work done by researchers at Fiontar, Dublin City University (DCU) in the identification of valuable non-digital language resources, the digitisation of these resources where necessary, and the application of web, database, and language technology to these resources to widen access and availability, and to increase effectiveness and usability

  • One of the advantages of the Léacslann system is that multiple data stocks can be stored and managed in the same database. This allows the editorial tools to be reused across multiple terminology and lexicography projects

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Summary

Introduction

Irish is a low-resourced language, the Irish Government’s 20 Year Strategy for the Irish Language, which prioritises the “promotion and protection” of the language (Government of Ireland, 2010), has brought about investment in the creation of digital language tools and resources. Linguistic resources, such as printed dictionaries, are being made available electronically through retrodigitisation, or being created digitally, and enhanced with search engines powered by language technologies, such as spelling error detection. All of Fiontar’s digital language tools and resources are made available at or linked to from http://www.gaois.ie/ (gaois ‘wisdom’)

Terminology and lexicography
Onomastics
Folkloristics
Technologies and hosting
Findings
Conclusion

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