Help us tear down language barriers together

Europeana strives to offer multilingual access to digital cultural heritage in Europe. This is a big technical challenge as it’s not just the content which is multilingual but the users who speak Europe’s 25+ different languages too. Making sure users can find relevant objects even in languages that they are not familiar with requires sophisticated algorithms and user interactions that bridge the linguistic gap.

In recent years, Europeana has worked on lots of solutions geared towards providing a truly multilingual cultural heritage portal. Among these solutions is the query translation process, the multilingual enrichment of content metadata with semantic resources (including thesauri) and the automatic detection of the user's’ preferred language based on the browser locale and cookie settings.

Enrichment of the dc:creator field with language variants for “Johannes Vermeer” from DBpedia.

In the EU-funded project Europeana v3.0, a whole task was dedicated to researching multilingual best practices in the cultural heritage domain. A White Paper summarizes the main findings and state-of-the-art practices we found. This will instruct Europeana’s future work to tackle language issues. Now, we are looking for your input and experience with multilingual data and multilingual users. Help us turn this White Paper into a community effort by contributing your expert knowledge!

We invite you to leave your thoughts and comments on the White Paper until September 11 here.