The efforts to promote the use and visibility of Euskera in the new technologies will be the basis of the day. The days have been created with the aim of offering a practical approach and showing the projects. The conference will focus on the talks of people with a vision of Euskal Herria, Catalan Countries and at the European level.

From home, the editor-in-chief of Lander Arbelaitz argia.eus will talk about the Argia experience. Egoitz Goikoetxea, of the project Ageri.net, will talk about the importance of disseminating the contents in Basque, as well as about the importance of making them visible. The guest will talk about the techniques to position the contents at the top of the searches and satisfy the wishes of the users of Euskaldunes on the Internet.

Albert Cuesta, a journalist, translator and expert in new technologies, will talk about an experience that has been experienced in the Catalan countries. Cuesta, who promoted the campaign of the return of Twitter to Catalan, will give his point of view on the political situation in Catalonia. Davyth Hicks, director of the Eurolang minority languages agency, will make known the situation and projects of other minority languages in Europe.

Tropel, Osasunlingua and Digital Slate

In addition to the talks, the conference will present some of the practical experiences developed in the Basque Country: The projects of Tropela, Osasunlingua and Pizarra Digital, among others, will be announced.

The platoon is a website entirely in Euskera and is mainly based on cycling competitions. Around this hobby, they have also managed to bring together people who are not Euskaldun.

Osasunlingua is a computer application created by the company Akting for healthcare. The goal is for patients and doctors who do not share the same language to understand each other. The material is deployed on the Osakidetza internal network and is available in twelve languages. Among the materials there is a questionnaire. Each responds in his/her own language and doctors receive the information translated into the language they understand.

The day will also feature the digital whiteboard for the bertsos. It's an application to help you learn how to sing bertsos, and it's a project by Manex Agirrezabal from the IXA group. It contains a search engine, a corrector and a syllable counter. The interface also has a synonym search engine.

Search techniques for what you want

Egoitz Goikoetxea Ageri.net works on the project, advising on techniques that facilitate visibility on the Internet.

Egoitz Goikoetxea believes that websites in Euskera have much to do to gain visibility on the Internet: “They make websites, but they don’t do what people are looking for.” Although it used to be intuition, Goikoetxea has pointed out that nowadays Google itself gives a lot of information about how the platform works.

Two main techniques to appear in Google searches are: one for payment and another for SEO (Search Engine Optimization), “to adapt our website to the conditions of the Google search engine”. In the titles of the pages it is appropriate to include keywords and label the contents in the words of Goikoetxea: "For Google to see that one website is more important than another, it must have a specific title on what that page is working on. We will not have a website with the same title on all its pages.” The more links we have to access these websites, the higher we will be in the search list.

If SEO is done in Euskera, other content in Euskera can be put forward in the search list, but since in Spanish there is more content on global issues, more links and a better classification are often given. “Even if that happens, that doesn’t mean you can’t do SEO in Basque.”

Regarding the habit of doing searches in Basque, Goikoetxea realizes that there is no data, but that the Basque does several searches in Spanish, “because when they try to search for them in Basque they do not find what they want.” Therefore, in his opinion, it is important that the websites created in Euskera give importance to SEO, “otherwise the Euskaldunes will not do searches in Euskera”.

In short, “the moment we create the contents, the key is to put them in the place of the person who is going to perform the search and take into account what they are going to look for”. Today, Google offers a small help: “In the search box itself, it gives recommendations based on the searches that previous people have done.”

Translating social networks into Catalan

The translator and expert in new technologies Albert Cuesta launched a campaign to return Twitter to Catalan. Several months have passed, and according to the service twitterencatala.org, in mid-September about 50,000 users have had a profile in Catalan in their Twitter account. As Cuesta explained, his welcome has been warmer than he expected: “It should be kept in mind that many users use Twitter from the mobile phone and it is not possible to return that application.” For Cuesta, this should be the next challenge: “Translation needs to be fine-tuned and the mobile platform returned.”

At the Euskarabildua Day he explained that he is very interested in knowing the details of the translation of Twitter in Euskera. According to the translator, new technologies are “powerful tools” to strengthen communities. However: “The impact on street use and consumption should continue with caution, as the diose effect of the experience does not always result in a better linguistic quality.”

Twitter and minority language

Putting languages that are not supported by the State on Twitter’s options has not been an easy task. In the case of Catalan, thousands of people joined the campaign and joined the call for help. Barcelona too. Twitter can also be a pressure tool. However, Albert Cuesta considers that, rather than by conviction, the company has given permission for fatigue: “The designation of Barcelona as the world capital of the mobile phone would probably help Catalan. But in the company there are few people sensitive to Catalan, and some of the strategic positions have stood against this type of translations”.

In the translation of Twitter, Cuesta underlined the importance of community work: “Digital platforms greatly facilitate the organization of dispersed collectives to coordinate actions and achieve citizen support.” However, many Internet companies are still awaiting their strategies: “They do not listen to citizen campaigns that affect the company’s strategies.” In Cuesta’s words, “if the processes that are now underway end in another political framework, these companies should take care of the new situation”.