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The Future of Cantonese in a Digital Age

數碼時代粵語嘅前途
隨住人工智能技術嘅急速發展,語言學家開始關注粵語喺數碼領域嘅存亡問題。目前大部分語音辨識同機器翻譯系統都以普通話為主,粵語嘅支援明顯不足。
As AI technology develops rapidly, linguists have begun to pay attention to the survival of Cantonese in the digital domain. Currently most speech recognition and machine translation systems prioritise Mandarin, with notably insufficient Cantonese support.
香港中文大學語言學教授李敏華指出:「粵語有超過八千萬使用者,但係喺數碼基礎設施方面嘅投入遠遠落後於其他主要語言。如果唔盡快建立完善嘅粵語語料庫同訓練數據,粵語將會喺AI時代被邊緣化。」
CUHK linguistics professor Li Man-wah points out: Cantonese has over 80 million speakers, but investment in digital infrastructure lags far behind other major languages. Without quickly building comprehensive Cantonese corpora and training data, Cantonese will be marginalised in the AI era.
近年有唔少民間團體同科技公司開始投入粵語AI研發。其中一個名為「粵語AI聯盟」嘅組織已經收集咗超過一萬小時嘅粵語語音數據,用嚟訓練語音辨識模型。
In recent years, many civil organisations and tech companies have begun investing in Cantonese AI R&D. One group called the Cantonese AI Alliance has collected over 10,000 hours of Cantonese speech data for training recognition models.
有學者認為,保護粵語唔單止係技術問題,更加係文化認同嘅議題。「語言承載住一個民族嘅集體記憶同文化基因。當一種語言喺數碼世界消失,佢所承載嘅文化亦都會跟住褪色。」
Scholars argue that protecting Cantonese is not merely a technical issue but a matter of cultural identity. Language carries a people's collective memory and cultural DNA. When a language disappears from the digital world, the culture it carries fades too.
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