In a pioneering initiative to promote the use of Basque alongside Spanish, the Basque Government has developed an advanced artificial intelligence (AI) translator called ‘Itzuli’. Óscar Guadilla, responsible for Innovation and Technological Surveillance at the Informatics Society of the Basque Government (EJIE), has highlighted the project as a crucial means to facilitate bilingual communication both in the public administration and in the daily life of its citizens.
Using modern Red Hat technologies, ‘Itzuli’ offers translation functions from Basque to Spanish, French, and English, as well as voice-to-text transcription and text-to-voice synthesis in these languages. This project reflects the regional government’s commitment to the preservation of Basque, considered the oldest living language in Europe and spoken or understood by 62% of the Basque population.
The challenge of maintaining the language in the context of digital globalization has led EJIE to adopt Red Hat’s hybrid cloud solutions to create a robust and scalable IT infrastructure. This has included the use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift, which have enabled the implementation of a DevOps approach, granting greater autonomy to development teams and facilitating continuous integration.
Collaboration with Vicomtech and other entities such as the Basque Institute of Public Administration (IVAP) and the Department of Culture and Linguistic Policy has been fundamental. They have worked together to train neural networks with bilingual documents accumulated over more than three decades, allowing ‘Itzuli’ to capture specific contexts, including legal-administrative and colloquial ones.
Since its launch in 2019, the ‘Itzuli’ application has reached over 100,000 downloads and is used daily by more than 30,000 people, demonstrating its effectiveness and popularity among Basque speakers and speakers of other languages. Currently, EJIE is expanding ‘Itzuli’s capabilities to include automatic transcriptions in legal proceedings, which is in the pilot phase and promises to transform the legal field as well.
The Basque Government’s efforts to integrate cutting-edge technology in the promotion and use of Basque not only underscore its leadership in technological innovation but also its dedication to promoting a multilingual and inclusive society.