 What do you call a European who only speaks one language, an American or a Romanian or a Hungarian? Truth be told, according to your stat, is the British, who speak the least languages in Europe, closely followed by my country and our immediate neighbor. Despite popular belief, the majority of Europeans actually do not have access to learning foreign languages, and being bi or multilingual is still a privilege for most. I am suspicious of technology. I think everybody should be suspicious of technology. However, that shouldn't stop us from using it where it can really help. You can use AI-generated text, why not? It's also a tool, but please be transparent with it. There is this huge desire to save on human cost. It really undermines job security. We are democracies, and functioning democracy needs a functioning media sector, which also means that the public service media need to have some sort of independence. One part of the story is that Ukrainians want their story to be heard around the world, and people are interested. But we don't have enough translators, so hurry up AI and help us with this. Welcome to Standard Time, a Eurozone production. This is a talk show with guests from all over Europe. Today we have them join forces in our special episode, flaunting some display Europe founders joining me to talk machine translations, language models and open access publishing across Europe. I'm Mareka Kinga Pop, or according to the speech recognition software used to subtitle this show, Rico Kinga Pop. I'm the editor-in-chief of Eurozone. It's the online magazine presenting this show and the co-founder of the display Europe platform. Since this is a digital production, you get to watch it with subtitles on your respective standard time, and potentially in your respective language too. Should it be any of the 15 languages display offers subtitles in? Check it out. Europe is covered by a rich tapestry of languages that make up a small yet very diverse continent. With English having become our most recent lingua franca, you may tour almost any country without needing a dictionary. With AI on the rise, some don't even use this universal language anymore. Instead, they navigate their way through linguistic minefields with automated translation and voice detection. Of course, there are pitfalls. For instance, Google translates voice assistant does have a menacing robot voice and a thick American accent. Our writer, Salma, for instance, managed to offend a lot of people in Greece last summer. For future reference, skato means without sugar in Greek and skata means shit. Some speculate about the world being taken over by robots. For translators specifically, the fear of this probability seems to increase by the minute. Many argue, however, that we still have a long way to go before tech can replace us and we have a lot of opportunity to turn it to a direction that benefits humans instead of antagonizing us. Research also dampens this dystopian fear. Though machine translation can be affected with simple and direct text, it still has a lot to catch up on when it comes to culture and the arts and subtle meanings. Dealing with biases or being able to read between lines, for example, are valuable human skills that AI still lacks. Well, so do some editors, truth be told. Due to this, the need for human translators is still in high demand. And with the professional adapting, this symbiosis has sure to further evolve. Since we established that AI is not going to replace us any time soon, should we just keep calm and carry on with our lives without worrying about how it might affect our employment contracts? Unfortunately, not really, though AI might not have the power to diminish the need for human labor, it can still alter it for better or worse. Increased AI human collaboration in workspaces indicates that in a lot of cases, workers no longer need to start a process from scratch and can rely on automation to a certain degree. For translators, this means saving time on paying a visit to the library and allowing AI tools to provide alternative translations or detect errors within them. But it also runs the risk of being outsourced. As many companies are pouring their resources into technological technologization, locally hiring professionals requires extra help that most employers are not willing to take. The European Commission has significantly increased its spending on translation technology in the past couple of years, consequently lowering recruitment levels. Post editing is the jargon used by EU translators for revisiting machine translated texts. It's become a crucial part of the job. Well, much of the profession has been outsourced to a gig economy as a consequence, promising faster and more efficient methods, but leading to, well, you guessed it, exploitation and job instability. Cristiano Sebastiani, President of Renovot et Democratic, a trade union representing EU employees, speculates that this cut in translation jobs poses a threat to the EU's multilingualism in favor of the English language. Are these anxieties justified? Or is there a way to change the course of AI? That's what we'll discuss today with our guests. With his Dutch-Italian finesse, editor-in-chief of Vox Europe, Gianpaolo Accarto, is here to introduce us to the world of multilingual news and debate. Legal expert Alexander Baratsitz is not afraid of AI. He is the founding president of the Culture Broadcasting Archive here in Austria and the legal lead at Creative Commons Austria. He is also the editor of the book Building European Digital Public Space, offering strategies for taking back control from big tech platforms. The Culture Broadcasting Archive offers the content of 28 radio stations in 50 languages. So check them out. CBA, Vox Europe and Eurazine are on a joint mission to confuse the heck out of everyone by translating Europe's community media into not one, not two, but 15 different languages through the display platform. Joining us online is our special guest, Frances Pinter. She is an open access advocate and the first woman to ever establish her own publishing company in the UK. She's the founder of Knowledge Unlatched, the Open Climate Campaign and the Supporting Ukrainian Publishing Resilience Recovery Organization, or SUPER. Today we come to you from Café Disco in the Zonwenviertel in Vienna, Austria. We'll tell you more about them later. Very welcome, Frances and gentlemen. Today we talk about languages and what we do with them in Europe. So I'll start with a very dumb question. Why do we insist on so many languages? What does this linguistic diversity actually give us across Europe? Gian Paolo, you work across quite a number of those and you are a polyglot person yourself. So make your case. Europeans are pretty much attached and fond of their own mother language is the language they think in is the language often they write, they express themselves in. I reckon that if we had only one language for all, we would end up losing much of the diversity that makes Europe an interesting place. Frances, as a publisher, how do you mitigate this language barrier? How does this affect your work? Would it make your life easier if there was just like one unified language to publish in? Well, in many ways, it would make the life easier for all publishers to work in only one language. But I don't think that would be to the benefit of anyone. It was tried more recently to have a global universal language that was Esperanto. Indeed. Then it failed for a number of reasons. Language is so interwoven in the culture of people. Personally, I feel we undervalue the great skill that goes into good translation. Alex, you have in your book, you worked on a model, an intellectual and infrastructure model for creating what you call a European backbone that could connect people maintaining this linguistic diversity. So what's this European backbone? Well, we have now the possibility with this technical instruments that are and software tools that are available to do automatic translations and automatic transcripts, give by this the chance for a lot of people to get access to information, which is in other languages, reach out to all over Europe, get closer to the idea of a European public space. The other aspect is to link existing platforms with the existing audiences around search and recommendation across it, combine with the language tools, get an impression. What is the cost discussion after the elections in Slovakia that happened recently? Vox, Europe adopted machine translation not early on, but like forever, right? However, the introduction of these tools does affect the profession in general. How do we go about in a responsible way to adopt this new technology in a way that doesn't immediately wreck the profession? So machine translation to us is more a help than a tool we completely rely on. Some of our friends told us, OK, there's no more use for translators or for publications like yours because there's machine translation. Users will simply have to go on a newspaper in a language that they don't read the machine translated. And that's that's it. Actually, it's not that simple. First, you have to select what you want to offer your readers. And this takes time. And then there's also an issue of quality. Machine translation works impressively well. But it's still not perfect. It needs a lot of post editing. And that's where the skills of an editor or a translator or someone who has both those skills comes very useful. You can have texts that are published machine translated as such, but you have to be very transparent about it. You can use AI generated text. Why not? I mean, it's it's also a tool. But please be transparent with it. Yeah, but that's only part of the story. Join the display article club, a community space to exchange ideas and talk about the hard topics. Each month we host a discussion about the articles which are featured here on standard time, moderated by a journalist or editor. Everyone is invited to share their opinion, ask questions and offer critique. The article club is also an open space to discuss culture, politics and more with people all around Europe and around the world. The display article club is hosted on LinkedIn spaces and you can join us at the URL below on the display portal or you'll also find the link in display newsletters. Yeah, but now you're stealing my thunder. So let's get back to the conversation. That's something that I hear a lot from journalists and editors, especially in data journalism, investigative journalism, that the current stage of AI, here we're not talking about language models, but really like a day gathering and processing is really good to do the donkey work. It's not appropriate to draw all the conclusions, but it can flag up oddities, for instance, in a massive pool of things that with human capacity to browse through would take years upon years. So as you said, it's a tool, it's not a replacement. The reason I think that many in both in like literary editors and among translators and elsewhere are worried about these tools is not really, I would argue it's not really about the technology itself. It's about how owners and business managers tend to use these technologies. What we see all across the industrial revolution that there is this huge desire to save on human cost. It really undermines job security. We've seen this and political, for instance, reported on this, the link is in the show notes. But after all this long rant, let's come to Fran says, you as a publisher, you are an early adapter of technologies and you, you are not suspicious of technology. You argue that there is a responsible way to adopt these technologies. Can you tell us about what this means in, for instance, academic publishing? OK, I am suspicious of technology. I think everybody should be suspicious of technology. However, that shouldn't stop us from using it where it can really help. I mean, in academic publishing, which can be very technical in the hard sciences and and very fluid in the humanities, machine generated text and AI is one part of what is being looked at. And just general speeding processes up through digital transformations is another. And so it's hard to talk about them together because one has been underway for good 20, 30 years, while the other one is relatively new. One thing that I'm looking at is can we can we really get AI to summarize complex humanities and social science text as a publishing industry is absolutely obsessed with this at the moment. Every company is working very hard in this area. This space is going to move forward very quickly. And I think if we use it carefully, it can be really exciting. I think what's going to happen is there'll be more space for creativeness, while some of the more time consuming and frankly, not that much fun processing goes on through the machines. This program is brought to you by Eurasian, your go to place for engaging reads from over 100 partner publications across dozens of languages to support our work and enjoy special benefits. Visit patreon.com slash Eurasian and become a supporter starting at three euros a month. This talk show is a production of Display Europe, a new content sharing platform that respects your user data. We are covering politics, culture and more. And we say a big thanks to Bikes and Rails for providing the venue for this episode. If we embrace this technological change, I mean, we don't really have another option than to embrace it and try to direct it into some shape or form that's going to make sense for the humans involved. So, Alex, what do you think? How does this change, for instance, Display Europe as a platform that aggregates across existing publications online? In a longer run, who is going to be responsible for maintaining this? First, I want to agree that, I mean, for Display without these tools, we wouldn't be able to come across in 15 languages or in future in 27 languages as its plans. The funding is another question and this is also something that we want to address with this project. The consumption of news more and more is over social media. And so, we have a shift here in the funding. What has been income for commercial media? 50% of this has gone to the big tech platforms in the last couple of years and you can imagine what this means for the whole sector. I mean, this is a dramatic shift and it's a dramatic situation for the media landscape in Europe. They are commercial endeavors, they are not there to build the European public space and the European policy makers they try to tackle this with regulation but it doesn't change the fundamental situation. Corporates going to corporate, like there's no other option but there are other options, right? From my perception, the other option would be to build up sovereign European digital space. Infrastructure is run by European endeavors and actually there is a strategy of the European Commission to, I mean, slowly tackle this issue. The data strategy is to collect data from specific industries across Europe and to get them to work them together with these aggregated data and make new business models out of it. So basically what you are promoting is an expansion and renewal of the public service model into a digital time. Jean-Paul Vauxrop chose a different path and you guys count on readers and sort of small-scale investors involvement and dedication to Vauxrop by the way I'm one of your shareholders very small shareholder. I'm very proud. Don't expect big return on investment apart from a moral one or a prestige one. If I get any I will donate that to yours. We chose a model that is rather niche and alternative. If you want to work a cooperative mostly by the people who work for it, be it journalists or translators or contributors or friends. I'm not sure to what extent this model can be scaled up to a European level but if you look at the investment of the European institutions into the media it's really a few million euros per year compared to the billion of dollars that US-based platforms are spending. If we talk EU level we might hope that European institutions are more or less prone to political interference or anyway that there will be more super parties. Fingers crossed, yes. But there's simply not the money for it. Let's be honest. So the EU institutions can support initiatives like Display Europe. That's only so much they can do with the funding they have and the funding they have depends on the member states and how much they are willing to support for more funding and the current mood is that media is not a priority for the member states at least at the European level. Also the better organized and more independent joint European public sphere is the harder it is to to exercise direct political interference, right? We can show with this players and exercises that we manage with just open source tools which shows that we can build up a unique European infrastructure or sovereign without the big money. It's just a question of political will to do it. The member states have been very keen on being responsible for the media sphere. Nobody wanted to have interference there. European Union tries to sort of say clear we are democracies and functioning democracy needs functioning media sector which also means that the public service media need to have some sort of independence. The question is still if the commission takes money into its hands and pour it in the media sector how will you distribute it? This grassroots things are for the moment appear to be one of the most interesting examples and we also need to find money within our group so to say to have some sort of also grassroots funding to develop a minimum of independence. Hey there, let me just flag you up someone who has a personal favorite of mine easily the favorite podcaster of mine in the whole wild world. She's a colleague and a partner Claire Potter a professor emeritus of history from the new school for social research in New York. She was the co-founder of public seminar one of our partners in the Euro-Z network and her sub-stack called political junkie and her podcast called why now are fantastic so if you like these kinds of in-depth and entertaining conversations you're going to love everything that Claire does. Subscribe to her sub-stack, listen to her podcast and just tell her that you love her because she deserves all good things in the world. Now back to the program. I want to turn to Fran says because open source has been mentioned and we have talked about funding but you are a big advocate and important advocate of open access which is not the same thing. How people should imagine open access which really ties in here and how we should imagine this being sustained. Okay so open access began as a grassroots initiative. In fact it was a group of scientists who met in Budapest. They came up with something called the Budapest Open Access Initiative. Now that was way back in 2001 and since then it's both a business model and an approach. Public research should be made publicly available. Everybody still wants the content to be published properly that all costs money. The idea behind open access is that those costs are paid upfront to the publisher in exchange for which the publisher makes the content open access. Just under 50% of all scientific journal articles are open access. The European Union is very much behind this and is now it was a policy now it's a mandate that that research which they fund which is tens of billions of euros worth of research must be made open access. The big publishers have figured out how to do this in a way that has actually meant that they have gotten a lot of this upfront money to pay for open access and they're actually increasing their market share of research publications and we're now at the point where there's a second generation of business models coming through in the first iteration of open access while it has done a great job. We found that those people who couldn't find the money to pay the publishers couldn't publish open access and so hopefully within the next few years when newer models are in place we will see a world which has equity of access to publishing as well as access to reading and that partnered with AI will go beyond the dreams of any science fiction writer. When you talk about publishing and also small research organizations talking about publishing in English or in the local language. It's the same the costs of publishing need to be paid for many of the smaller countries do have more public support for going open access to support their languages but it is coming together and it is moving forward at a European policy level. Today we come to you from Café Disco a cool small cafe here in the Zonwen Viertel in Vienna Austria. This is part of Bikes and Rails. It's a housing project whose units can never be monetized. Check out our episode on housing to learn more about it. It also houses a bike repair shop. You can hear them in the background but now back to where we were before. For a publication to be let's say accessible to the wider number it has to be in English or on an English speaking publication those are the most prestigious and the ones that are read the most among the scientific community. There is research data about this incredible disparity between first language English speakers and basically everybody else which is the vast majority of people on earth and it's not based on scientific or research merit it's based on an access issue and it does affect research and academia both as like an ecosystem and as a career path. Publishers have in effect being the proxy for the institutions when it comes to assessing someone's suitability for hiring and promotion. More progressive universities are beginning to rethink this because actually the old metrics their impact their the the importance of their research really is no longer a marker that should be given so much dominance. A scientific translator a French one who was explaining how the non-native English speaker researchers are have a competitive disadvantage compared to the English native speakers because if they want something to be published on a prestigious review they have to have it translated into English and it's an expense that often researchers cannot afford. And let me just mention one positive example for this because one of our collaborators I'm a big fan of is called Cannes this is a we'll put them on the screen and it will be in the show notes as well they are a network and an infrastructure of French journals academic and cultural and what they do is that they both provide a platform to access to promote French language cultural and intellectual production and they also provide translations because they want to increase the impact of this intellectual production in the international sphere. This situation that the European Research Council decided that if you receive grants from them you need to publish this open accessible is a really really big thing and it just happened recently and this was a political decision how we spent our money and I think in the media sector we can do it as well. This was one point a second point is this language barrier is still there especially for small languages so for example speech recognition between Hungarian or Slovenian is partially not existent on an open source level. This is a competition disadvantage to a US market where you have one lingua franca so to say and we have need to overcome this in Europe. I'm coming from a podcasting platform originally CBA and we have content in 15 50 different languages although it's produced all in Austria. Coming back to this idea of the commission to cut out the middleman so to say by collecting data in the sector and make use of it what I could imagine is that people donate data. Small things to flag up although speech recognition in Hungarian is not quite as prolific as in bigger languages. The research institute dedicated to this from the science academy and that's stocky they have done a fantastic job and they they were pioneers in this field and they do a lot of interesting research. So there's this disparity between regional representation and we talked about linguistic diversity for a note to end on. Let's take a step back so if we imagine a not so very distant future with positive developments in which direction for instance publishing has to move. Well publishing has to continue on this road to open access but the cake needs to be sliced slightly differently going forward. I was some colleagues set up last year something called the open climate campaign.org if you want to have a look at it and what we're doing there is where do we have to go to encourage policy changes and urging mandates to ensure that those policies are implemented getting people to think where the funding is going to come from and get that into place on an issue which is on climate change and biodiversity. We do have the opportunity to show just how rich the research environment is around the world when all of that is fixed and we see it on with open climate. Hopefully it'll spread throughout all the other disciplines and we will have a world where most academic research is open. So I see the future as being right. I set up something called suprr.org. It stands for supporting Ukrainian publishing resilience and recovery and here what we're trying to do is help the Ukrainian publishers get ready for EU membership because things will have to change. One part of the story is that Ukrainians want their story to be heard around the world and people are interested but we don't have enough translators so hurry up AI and help us with this. So it's interesting to see how politics will be influencing what happens with translations. I think that's a really nice note to end on. As you said, publishing can transform the world. It has done a couple times over so come on move up. Let's do that. Thank you everyone. Thank you so much. This program is presented by Eurazine, an online magazine bringing you reads from more than a hundred partner publications and across dozens of European languages. This talk show is the display Europe production, a platform offering content on politics, culture, community and so much more and it somehow miraculously also doesn't abuse your user data. A shocker I know. 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