The BerbaTek project for Basque: Promoting a less-resourced language via language technology for translation, content management and learning

Basque is both a minority language (only a small proportion of the population of the Basque Country speaks it) and also a less-resourced language. Fortunately, the Basque regional government is committed to its recovery, and has adopted policies for funding, among other things, language technologies, a field which a language aiming to survive cannot dispense with. BerbaTek was a 3-year (2009-2011) strategic research project on language, speech and multimedia technologies for Basque carried out by a consortium of five members, all prominent local organizations dedicated to research in the above-mentioned areas, and partially funded by the Departments for Industry and Culture of the Basque Government. Collaboration in BerbaTek allowed to carry out a great amount of both basic and applied research. In addition, various prototypes were developed to show the potential of integrating the developed technologies to the language industry sector.