Over the Hurdle of Multilingualism to Global Leadership

The Digital Single Market (DSM) has been declared a European priority by the European Commission. Rightfully so! Software eats everything and particularly eCommerce is enjoying dramatic growth rates and thus heavy investment. VP Andrus Ansip  has nicely summarized the vision of the Digital Single Market: “Consumers need to be able to buy the best products at the best prices, wherever they are in Europe.”

Today, unfortunately, that means that the consumer is in most cases spending her/his money on a non-European site. The numbers are actually shocking: according to a recent Commission infographic the Digital Market today is made up by 39% national online services (likely not giving you the best deal) and 57% by US-based online services. EU cross-border, however, represents only a minuscule four percent!

Given also the potential for growth and new jobs, the Commission has launched a digital strategy to pave the way towards the DSM. It lists many laudable initiatives, like affordable parcel delivery costs, tackling of geo-blocking, simplifying VAT arrangements (after they just have been made unmanageable for cross-border SMEs), modernizing copyright, and strengthening European data protection rules. All this will surely help, but does it really address the core challenge of the Digital Single Market?

Commissioner Oettinger  recently stated that "a Polish citizen being refused to buy products on a German website is not compatible with the idea of Europe". I am not so sure whether that online business is really rejecting the customer. Why should it? It probably rather has a hard time communicating with this customer. But worse, the Polish citizen likely never managed to find the German website. A simple search already breaks the vision of border-less shopping. Enter a string in your language and the search results will already trap you in your national market. But even if a product name search crossed these language silos, the Polish citizen probably won’t understand what the German website is offering and under which conditions.

The main hurdle towards a Digital Single Market are Europe’s many languages. It’s amazing how politics, but also business, have overlooked this so far! Or maybe rather chosen to ignore it? Perhaps because they don’t know how to solve it? The big investments in technologies to overcome the language barrier have often produced only academic results. The field is dominated by research institutions and small niche players. This makes it hard to discover, purchase, and deploy language technology solutions.

Luckily, language technologies can today indeed enable the Polish citizen to find, buy, and use a German product or vice versa. By using data-driven approaches, innovative language technologies such as search, automatic translation, voice recognition, knowledge management, sentiment analysis, and many others, have achieved acceptable quality for the major languages. They are ready to be deployed in European eCommerce sites.

However, for achieving the vison of the Digital Single Market, we have to support at least all our 24 official languages and those of our most important trading partners. This requires a basic natural language processing (NLP) infrastructure. The European Language Technology industry is therefore pushing for the European Language Cloud (ELC), a public infrastructure providing the basic functionality required to process unstructured content. Through an API the ELC provides basic language technology services such as tokenization, named entity detection, etc. for all languages, in the same base quality, under the same favorable terms.

On top of this infrastructure, European language technology companies, mostly SMEs, will expose their offerings in the LTI Cloud. The LTI Cloud is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) wrapper around language technology components and functions as a marketplace. It will make it easy for start-ups, eCommerce, system integrators, and software companies to discover and plug ‘n’ play language technology.

The fourth edition of the LT-Innovate Summit, the yearly point of convergence of the Language Technology industry, will explore how to concretely launch these crucial building blocks for the DSM.

In a recent article, the Washington Post mocked Europe’s DSM efforts by stating that "Europe’s digital decline is accelerating". I would counter that. Why don’t we turn this much moaned about hurdle of Europe’s multilingualism into a unique opportunity? If we manage, in spite of our many cultures and languages, to create a Multilingual Digital Single Market and cross-border eGov, we will become the fittest for the global market.

Jochen Hummel is CEO of ESTeam & Coreon and Chairman of LT-Innovate

European Software Companies need a Language Cloud

The high reply rate in a recent survey amongst LT-Innovate members calls for a European Language Cloud.

Language Technology firms experience a strong growth and almost all are hiring.

Companies need language technology to communicate with their increasingly global customer base. Moreover, the data revolution and advances in human-machine interaction depend on understanding natural languages. Unfortunately Europe’s SMEs struggle to satisfy this striking demand. Many software innovations, but also basic functions such as search, work only well in English. Whoever works with languages faces soon the demand for supporting many languages... or to remain a small national player. Many EU institutions, for example, demand the equal support of their 24 official languages.

Support for many languages is cost-prohibitive, because it has to be developed individually per language. No surprise that an overwhelming majority of the industry would thus make use of a basic language infrastructure which provides features such as lemmatization or named entity detection. Higher level functions and services face some skepticism, since they might be competing with commercial offers. However, judging by the percentage of companies ready to use a cloud service and the fact that they are willing to pay a price for using it (preferably to a non-profit organisation), the need for a Language Cloud appears to be well established.

Hardly any European company can address all language needs of global customers. Besides the technical infrastructure, many LT-Innovate members thus share the vision of the European Language Cloud as a SaaS wrapper. They want to provide and monetize their specific capability while leveraging components of other providers.

What are your views? Please share them with us by commenting on this article!

Jochen Hummel, Chairman of the Board of Directors, LT-Innovate - CEO, ESTeam

See survey results.

LT-Innovate welcomes the Connecting Europe Facility and calls for the inclusion of a Multilingual Digital Service Infrastructure as a matter of priority.

In an Open Letter to Neelie Kroes, Jochen Hummel, Chaiman of LT-Innovate and CEO of ESTeam offers to the Commissioner the encouragement and full collaboration of LT-Innovate in making the European Language Cloud available to European institutions, businesses and citizens as soon as possible. Why? 

"In our view, a major public investment in ICT networks is only justified if it goes hand in hand with a substantial effort to create and/or strengthen European platforms, in particular a language platform." To make business on a multilingual continent, we need to overcome "the language barriers that are still one of the main factors accounting for the fragmentation of the Single Market."

In addition, "the European Language Cloud would considerably bring down the costs of cross-border products and services and allow all Europeans to seamlessly interact with the 1 billion+ market of speakers of European languages. This would constitute a major opportunity and boost for the European economy and society, creating many new jobs. In a second step, such a platform should also support the languages of our major trading partners, thus making European companies fittest for the global markets."

To read the full open letter, click here.