Language technologies for a multilingual public administration in Spain

Interactions between citizens and the public administration are increasingly taking place by electronic means, often referred to as e-government. In Spain, these interactions mostly have to be monolingual, in Spanish, in the case of the central administration, but may be bilingual or even multilingual in autonomous communities that have their own official language. In this paper, we intend to show how state-of-the-art oral and written linguistic technologies for Spain’s coofficial languages could allow speakers of these languages to use them in many of their administrative relations with any Spanish public agency, thereby facilitating the conversion of Spain’s mostly monolingual administration into a multilingual one, enhancing digital language equality and guaranteeing the linguistic rights of speakers of minoritised languages. We will present an overview of the most promising language technologies in terms of their relevance from the point of view of multilingual communication between citizens and the administration. We will also review the existing technologies for Spain’s co-official languages, and present some ideas on how these could be integrated towards the multilingual transformation of Spanish public administrations without neglecting some of the attendant ethical and legal issues. The present work is intended to serve as an introductory and accessible overview for legislators, administrators, or any other person interested in the potential of language technologies to assist in developing a multilingual public administration.