Meta Launches Language Technology Partner Program to Advance AI Translation

Meta announced today its Language Technology Partner Program in collaboration with UNESCO, aimed at gathering audio and text from a variety of languages to enhance and develop AI translation models.

The Language Technology Partner Program focuses on underresourced languages to support UNESCO’s global initiative, the International Decade of Indigenous Languages—created to raise awareness and protect Indigenous languages worldwide.

The tech giant also shared an open invitation for more people and organizations to join the program. Meta expects new partners to contribute with speech recordings with transcriptions—of over 10 hours—and large texts with more than 200 sentences.

“Our work with UNESCO to expand the support of underserved languages in AI models is an essential part of this effort,” states the announcement shared by Meta. “Developing models that are able to work on multilingual problems and in underserved languages not only promotes linguistic diversity and inclusivity in the digital world, but also helps us create intelligent systems that can adapt to new situations and learn from experience.”

In exchange, the partners who join the program will receive technical workshops from Meta’s research teams. The Canadian government of Nunavut has already agreed to collaborate by providing data in the Inuit languages Inuktitut and Inuinnaqtun.

Meta also announced an open-source machine translation benchmark, allowing other companies and AI developers to test their translation models.

Spain recently announced an open-source AI model called Alia, which has been trained in Castilian, and the co-official languages in the country: Catalan, Basque, Galician, and Valencian.