Supertext develops world’s first Romansh translator for Radiotelevisiun Svizra Rumantscha (RTR)

With around 30,000 speakers, Romansh is Switzerland’s smallest national language. While AI-based machine translation is widely used in the other national languages, a corresponding service for Rumantsch Grischun has not been available until now. A collaboration between Radiotelevisiun Svizra Rumantscha (RTR) and Supertext aims to develop such a system and make it available as a common tool for everyday use.

The overarching goal of the collaboration is to promote the preservation of a minority language by developing an instant translator for Romansh. In order to do so, a language model is trained on existing data over the course of several weeks, enabling it to “learn” the relevant translation mechanisms. Repeatedly showing the model existing translations causes it to internalise the language. The challenge here is to provide appropriate and sufficiently large data sets to drive this iterative process forward. In comparison to the other national languages, Romansh has few existing language resources. In addition, native speakers needed to be recruited to support the process by regularly checking the language quality.

The development happened in two stages. In the first stage, a Romansh to German translation model was created, and in the second stage, a German to Romansh model was created. In total, 250,000 parallel segments have been used so far. These were taken from existing, freely available data such as legal texts, the Federal Constitution and press releases from the Romansh-speaking canton of Graubünden. Moreover, existing data from RTR is incorporated into the training and prioritised. This means that the system is customised for RTR’s texts and is particularly well-suited to its text types.

And the system is having an impact: the first translation results were promising and the translator quickly became a helpful tool for the RTR language experts in their daily editorial work. It continually reduces the effort required for editing and revision. The AI translator is now also available to the general public – and can even be used for free without a subscription.

The instant translator ensures that the public broadcasting service is available in the pan-regional Romansh variant of Rumantsch Grischun – and thus puts an end to the confusion between the five Romansh dialects. The publicly available tool also makes it easier to use Romansh in everyday life by translating it from and into German, English, French and Italian. This expanded data base has enabled us to further refine the model and continuously improve its quality.

The tool can be used for translating individual words, entire texts or Word documents from and into Romansh. And by doing so, it hopefully contributes to the long-term preservation of Swiss cultural heritage.