Equal rights in digital space

Contributing ideas to the development of the Project to make Vietnam soon become a strong country in ICT at the end of 2009, the Vietnam Association of Young Scientific and Technological Intellectuals raised the question of having to answer clearly about the requirements. minimum requirements of the country with the development of ICT. That is the application of ICT for linguistic requirements, including the languages of ethnic minorities.

And as a result, when this Project was officially promulgated by the Government at the end of 2010, there was the phrase "Processing Vietnamese" in the 6th Task on Strengthening research capacity in the field of ICT, mastering and step by step create technology for manufacturing new products. According to insiders, the sub-task "Processing Vietnamese" should be understood in a broad sense to include translation technology, Sino-Nom and ethnic minority languages...

However, since this Project was officially promulgated until now, the concretization of the four words "Vietnamese processing" has not been implemented by anyone and so, in addition to many other tasks, the Of course, there is no policy framework for digitizing ethnic minority languages.

Figuratively speaking, Vietnamese (Kinh) was unified on the standard Unicode code in 2003. However, that is only with the National Language and a lot of work still needs to be done, of which it is impossible not to work with equal rights of ethnic minorities in digital space.

According to Dr. Dang Minh Tuan - author of Vietkey percussion, who has directly participated in the work of standardizing Vietnamese to the Unicode standard, the amount of digitization work for ethnic minority languages in Vietnam will be much larger. And to do this, there must first be a comprehensive evaluation and summary of what has been done in terms of digitizing ethnic minority languages. After that, there must be cooperation between information technology and linguistics experts on the basis of taking advantage of existing products and standardizing and registering them into the Unicode code table for all ethnic minorities.

This must be a State project. And according to Prof. Dr. Nguyen Van Hiep - former Director of the Institute of Linguistics, we are talking a lot about paying attention to the equal rights of ethnic minorities, but it would be a huge mistake if we did not pay attention, first and foremost. their language in the ICT and Internet environment. This is the equal rights of ethnic minorities in the 4.0 era.

A major State project for ethnic minority languages needed

Thus, forming a project invested by the State to digitize ethnic minority languages is a natural thing to do. This is a project that must have the participation of a team of information technology and linguist experts who have done in-depth research on ethnic minority languages. The budget source that needs to be invested by the State certainly cannot be small and of course, it should also be socialized with the participation of large enterprises such as Viettel, VNPT,... and the voluntariness of these enterprises. businesses and organizations inside and outside the ICT sector.

Certainly, there will need to be a general commander and the Government can assign the Committee for Ethnic Affairs to preside over this with the participation of the Institute of Linguistics and the Institute of Ethnology under the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences. Male.

Before that, this matter also needed to be discussed with the National Assembly and according to Delegate Be Trung Anh - Standing Member of the National Assembly's Ethnic Council, many compatriots still use their own ethnic language to communicate and communicate. information. So, if this can be done, it will be a very good thing. Fonts, percussion instruments, and even text turned into automatic speech are essential products for ethnic minorities to popularize knowledge and propagate the policies of the Party and State.

However, even with the State's investment interest and the voluntary contributions of businesses and organizations, having digital products for ethnic minority languages is not yet complete. An equally important task is how to popularize those products among ethnic minorities. According to Dr. Dang Minh Tuan, the ethnic minority intellectual community cannot be bystanders to this project but must even actively support, propagate and directly participate in training activities for the results. results achieved so that their fellow citizens can truly benefit.

Trinh Nguyen