Newsletter, October 2020

The ECSPM has just celebrated the EUROPEAN DAY OF LANGUAGES on 26 September and INTERNATIONAL TRANSLATION DAY on 30 September.

• We have recruited new university research units for the CURUM constituency of our Seven new units now have pending membership status, and when they join there will be a body of 15 constituents in total, forming a research alliance, a communal space for academic work, which is to contribute to the development of a European Education Area. This is a target we share with the European Commission, which is taking initiatives so that, by 2025, the first decisive steps to reinforcing the cultural dimension of the European Union will have been made, while monitoring educational attainment cross-nationally. These steps are to take forward the European Council’s mandate, comprising of proposals including the improvement of the teaching/learning of languages to ensure Europeans’ multilingual habitus and awareness raising regarding Europe’s shared heritage. The mandate also highlights the importance of collaborative work in the academic sector by networks of existing universities to boost cross-border cooperation through long-term institutional strategies.
• We have compiled information about the CURUM constituents – their mission, their research projects, activities, publications and their future. This information is presented in the CURUM BOOKLET we produced and presented to members.
• We are upgrading and updating our website, so that it contains even more useful information and material than it does now. It will be online by end October.
• We took part in the project proposal submitted in response to the EU call LANGEQ- 2020, aimed at “Developing a strategic research, innovation and implementation agenda and a roadmap for achieving full digital language equality in Europe by 2030”. This project, rooted in META-NET and strongly aligned with the European Language Grid, is guided by a core group consisting of the following institutions: DCU School of Computing, Dublin University, as coordinator, DFKI (Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz [German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence]), ILSP (Institute for Language and Speech Processing “Athena” C.), CUNI (Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic) and EHU (University of the Basque Country). Like us, the other partners represent various pan-European networks, initiatives and associations, as well as a group of companies and partners from research institutions. If the project is successful, all partners will have to produce one final report that provides input, collected from and consolidated with the relevant network’s initiative’s or association’s core constituency and membership, with regard to the goals of the project, i.e., with regard to the development of a strategic agenda and roadmap to develop digital language equality in Europe by 2030. These reports will include needs, demands, ideas, potential contributions for the agenda and the roadmap etc. Moreover, each partner is to help with desk research, dissemination of the project actions, results and other activities which will be carried out, aiming to make this important strategic project a success for the whole European Language Technology and Multilingual Europe community.

• The 2020 ECSPM Symposium, postponed due to COVID-19, will take place online, hosted by the Babylon Centre for the Study of Superdiversity, Univ. of Tilburg, Netherlands, 7-9 Dec. 2020. The theme is the same. New programme to appear on the events page of our website.
• The 2021 ECSPM Symposium will be hosted by the Centre of Multilingualism of the University of Konstanz, in Germany during the third week of June 2021. The theme is under discussion. More information to appear on the events page of our website.
• The Thematic Section entitled “Multilingualism in Flux” was proposed by a consortium of ECSPM-CURUM members and accepted as part the International Symposium on “Bilingualism in Flux”, to take place 9-14 July 2021, organised by the University of Warsaw, Poland. Three of our affiliates will speak at this Symposium and others will take part in a Round Table on “Policy and Practice in EMI: implications from research evidence from the Global South for stakeholders in different contexts”.
• ECSPM-CURUM members are collaborating to create an Action Plan (2021-2023) with synergies that will promote dialogue between the CURUM constituents and stimulate creative thinking, innovative teaching and the design of common projects, events, and other activities.