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A comment on Mozilla Common Voice Adds 16 New Languages and 4,600 New Hours of Speech. Parent comment

Re:Mozilla Common Voice Adds 16 New Languages and 4,600 New ... by runarberg on Thursday August 05, 2021 @02:08PM (#28077359)
No it has a lot to do with politics as well. A sovereign nation may find it important to have their languages supported widely on the internet so they might use some of the public funds into funding translation efforts and voice recognition/speech synthesizer contributions.

I know the Icelandic government spends some money for this and it shows. This tiny language has way more support then other way more spoken languages. If the Norwegian government wanted I bet the Sámi languages could have just as good of a support as Icelandic. Or if the Greenlandic government had more funds available I bet we would see Kalaallisut in more places online.

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Re:Mozilla Common Voice Adds 16 New Languages and 4,600 New ... by necovek on Thursday August 05, 2021 @02:35PM (#28077711)
What you are saying is that a small, relatively rich country can invest in supporting their own language: that, to me, is not political, but as raised previously, financial. It's also a good incentive for other big players (Google, Microsoft, Apple) to invest in a language that has prospective customers willing to spend more.

Serbian government would certainly support Serbian language voice recognition and synthesis, but probably not with as much money as Iceland would.

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Re:Mozilla Common Voice Adds 16 New Languages and 4,600 New ... by eropple on Thursday August 05, 2021 @03:17PM (#28078216)
> that, to me, is not political, but as raised previously, financial

The idea that there is a difference between these two things is one of the more pernicious ones of the last hundred years.

Money is power. The exercise of power is politics. They can't be separated.

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Re:Mozilla Common Voice Adds 16 New Languages and 4,600 New ... by monocasa on Thursday August 05, 2021 @03:45PM (#28078593)
> Politics (from Greek: Πολιτικά, politiká, 'affairs of the cities') is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations between individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status.

It certainly sounds like this is a political situation to me, almost to a tautology. The fact that these decisions was made on the basis of financial gain doesn't make them any less political.

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Re:Mozilla Common Voice Adds 16 New Languages and 4,600 New ... by ftyers on Thursday August 05, 2021 @04:56PM (#28079679)
The Norwegian government and Sámi parliament put a lot of effort into language technology for the Sámo languages. A big problem is lack of openness in platform support. E.g. Google and Apple make it very difficult for external developers to do localisation.
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