Data Collection and Language Technologies for Mapudungun

Mapudungun is spoken by over 900,000 people (Mapuche) in Chile and Argentina. Thanks to an active bilingual and multicultural education program, Mapuche children are now being taught to be literate in both Mapudungun and Spanish. The Chilean Ministry of Education has teamed up with the Language Technologies Institute's AVENUE project to collect data and produce language technologies that support bilingual education. The main resource that has come out of the Mineduc-LTI partnership is Mapudungun-Spanish parallel corpus consisting of approximately 200,000 words of text and 120 hours of transcribed speech. Plans are being made for machine translation and computer-assisted instruction.