Parliamentary question

Written question to the European Commission

The European Union guarantees the equality of all its 24 official languages, including Slovenian. Although multilingualism is promoted throughout the Union, in reality it is limited, as is clear on the internet and digital platforms. In practice, on the digital platforms of the European digital market there is both dubbing and subtitles for certain languages, while others, including Slovenian, are forgotten and discriminated against.

In Directive 2018/1808, the European Union specified that the means to achieve the accessibility of audiovisual media services should include, but need not be limited to, sign language, subtitling for the deaf and hard of hearing, spoken subtitles, and audio description. That Directive recognises the right of persons with an impairment and of the elderly to participate and be integrated in the social and cultural life of the Union and provides that audiovisual commercial communications must not include or promote any discrimination based on racial or ethnic origin or nationality.

1. What is the Commission doing, and what does it plan to do, in connection with the fragmentation of the digital single market where language barriers have been identified?
2. How has the Commission so far raised awareness, and how in future does it plan to increase companies’ awareness, of the benefits of the availability of online services, content and products in multiple languages, including lesser-used languages, with a view to overcoming language barriers and helping to preserve the cultural heritage of language communities?

Answer given by Mr Breton on behalf of the European Commission

With the proposal for a Declaration on European Digital Rights and Principles, the Commission recognises the need for a trustworthy, diverse and multilingual online environment.

The Digital Services Act[1], among other measures, will oblige very large online platforms and very large online search engines to publish their terms and conditions in the official languages of all Member States where they offer their services, and to tailor their risk assessments, where relevant, to specific regional or linguistic aspects.

As part of the supporting activities, the ‘European Language Equality’ project directly tackles the digital divide between well‐and less-resourced languages by monitoring the level of technology support across European languages and by exchanging good practice between Member States.

The Commission research programmes also cover the development and take-up of future language technologies. The ‘European Language Grid’ project also raised awareness of European language technology providers and services through its single platform.

In the Digital Europe Programme, EU small and medium-sized enterprises, public administrations, academia, and non-profit organisations have free access to an expanding set of language technologies, including machine translation, text pseudo-anonymisation, speech transcription and website translation services.

The Commission is launching the European Language Data Space to build an ecosystem of language resources, also for less-resourced languages. The goal is to increase the availability of online services, content and products in multiple languages while raising companies’ awareness of the benefits.

[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/TXT/?qid=1608117147218&uri=COM%3A2020%3A825%3AFIN