Sardu, abbarra vivu!

The project I intend to carry out is the creation of a MT engine for the language pair Italian-Sardinian based on the Apertium platform. As pointed out above, MT is crucial for the survival of minoritised languages. Apertium, having lead the development of RBMT engines in the last years, provides an excellent framework for language pairs of the same linguistic family without the need of linguistic corpora. The experience of Apertium with several minoritised languages such as Occitan, Asturian or Maltese proofs that such a project is viable. Google and Apertium would benefit from this project, not only because it would contribute to open-source software and minority languages, but especially because it would have a great impact in the Sardinian society, since at present there is no MT system for the Sardinian language, neither by Google nor by Apertium.