The United Nations has declared 2022-2032 the International Decade of Indigenous Languages, drawing global attention to the critical situation of many indigenous languages, and making a global call for action to identify ways to preserve, revitalize and promote these languages. Languages are critical to our culture and identity, and shape how we interact with each other.
To help further the International Decade, UNESCO, Meta, and Hugging Face launched an online Language Translator on September 23, 2024 as part of United Nations General Assembly week in New York, when world leaders from around the world descended on UN Headquarters to discuss the world’s most pressing challenges and solutions, including the preservation of Indigenous languages.
The UNESCO Language Translator is built on Meta’s No Language Left Behind (NLLB) open-source AI model, and hosted on Hugging Face spaces. Launched in 2022 by Meta’s Fundamental AI Research lab (FAIR), NLLB is a first-of-its-kind, open-source AI breakthrough project that is capable of delivering evaluated, high-quality translations directly between 200 languages—including low-resource languages like Asturian, Luganda, Urdu and more. It aims to give people the opportunity to access and share web content in their native language, and communicate with anyone, anywhere, regardless of their language preferences.
And because it is open-source, any organization or community can take the NLLB model and build applications and use cases on top of it, for free.
To celebrate this launch, Meta hosted a panel discussion at Meta House, Meta’s official presence at UNGA, and included four senior representatives – Dr. Tawfik Jelassi, UNESCO Assistant Director-General for Communication and and Information , Irene Solaiman, Head of Global Policy, Hugging Face, Yann LeCun, VP and Chief AI Scientist, Meta, and Kevin Machine, President, Swahili Cultural Institute.
UNESCO’s Global Action Plan of the International Decade of Indigenous Languages put forward a Global Call for Action that “aims to leave no one behind and no one outside.” Developed with a commitment to inclusivity, the UNESCO/Meta/Hugging Face Language Translator helps address the challenges faced by underrepresented and Indigenous languages in accessing technological advancements, ensuring that communities speaking these languages are not left behind.
This initiative is also featured as a key contribution of the US Department of State’s Partnership for Global Inclusivity on AI.
We are proud to include the UNESCO language translator as an example of an AI Alliance affiliate project that demonstrates the value of open-source AI, and look forward to doing more to protect and promote low-resources languages during the International Decade of Indigenous Languages.
Kevin Chan is the Director of Global Policy Campaigns Strategy at Meta.
