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We believe in the power of language to change lives through our programs

The Language Digitization Initiative is solutions-oriented and we focus on actionable deliverables.

The goal of Translation Commons’s Language Digitization Initiative (LDI) is to provide a vast array of resources such as toolkits, pilot studies, guidelines, and training to indigenous communities in order to improve their access to information. 

  1. Zero to Digital Guidelines
  2. TC Videos and Slide Presentations
  3. Indigenous Community presentations
  4. UN – UNESCO Documents
  5. In Progress
  6. Future Projects
TC Videos and Slide Presentations

Building Bridges for Digitization of Indigenous Languages by Jeannette Stewart (video)

An introduction to font issues for language support by Gerry Leonidas (video)

Text, Keyboard, Font, Essentials for your language on the internet by Craig Cornelius (video)

The Script Encoding Initiative and Unicode by Deborah Anderson (slides)

Accessing And Understanding Contents In Portuguese By Foreigners In Scientific Digital Libraries: Can This Methodology Be Generalized To Any Language And Script?  by Claudio Menezes (slides)

Language Documentation: A Brief Overview by Anna Belew (slides)

Terminology Management for Indigenous Languages by Sue Ellen Wright (video)

Terminology Management for Indigenous Languages by Sue Ellen Wright (slides)

IYIL 2019 Translation Commons Projects, TC Advisors (video)

Machine Translation for Indigenous Communities, by Kirti Vashee (video)

Discussion with UNESCO on IDIL, (video)

Indigenous Interpreters in Mexico, by Alexandra Hernandez Leon and Hector Santaella Barrera (video)

Modern NLP changes the requirements for building automatic Translation Systems, by Antonis Anastasopoulos (video)

Software Internationalization Principles and Strategies, by Tex Texin (video)

Bringing Newly Invented Scripts of South Asia into the Digital World, by Anshuman Pandey (video)

How Unicode Characters Become Glyphs on Your Screen, by Christopher Chapman, (video)

Making Optical Character Recognition Systems for Telugu, by Atul Negi (video)

Zero to Digital Series of Guidelines for Indigenous Communities, by Sue Ellen Wright (video)

Accelerating Support for Indigenous Languages in Digital Systems, by Jeannette Stewart and Craig Cornelius (video)

Digitization Solutions for Indigenous Languages, by Julie Anderson and Craig Cornelius (video)

Indigenous Languages Concerns of Identity and having Independent Script The case of India, by Siva Prasad Rambhatla (video)

Mukurtu CMS, by Michael Wynne (video)

UN – UNESCO Documents

Free and Prior Informed Consent

The Indigenous World 2020

UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

UNESCO Policy on Engaging with Indigenous Peoples

UNESCO’s Engagement with Indigenous Peoples

The Sustainable Development Goals Repost 2019

UNESCO’s Internet Universality Indicators

Publishing of the Zero to Digital: A Guide to Bring Your Language Online was an important milestone on our journey to prevent and reverse global language extinction. But there is still a lot of work to be done for ensuring human rights and connectivity for all the native languages. We call for localization and internationalization experts, language translation professionals, language community advocates, linguists, font designers and marketing experts to join our mission in breaking the language and communication barriers!

In Progress

Machine Translation Guidelines

Repository Guidelines

Certification Guidelines

Mentoring Guidelines

Internship Guidelines

Zero to Digital: bringing a language online Pilot with Sunuwar language

Future Projects

Language Technology Workshop  (Learn more)

Mapping the digitization status of all languages Database

Educational online teacher materials for sciences

Indigenous Translator Training