Time for Turkish
Turkey is a strong political and economic regional power that began negotiations for EU membership in 2005, leading to much stronger ties between the Eurasian nation and its European neighbours. In recent years, the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (Tubitak) has been working side by side with EU institutions to raise the country's innovativeness and competitiveness on many levels. One of these collaborations involves closer linguistic ties, a challenge that has counted on the support of Tubitak's National Research Institute of Electronics and Cryptology (UEKAE). In this context, the EU-funded project Multisaund is seeking to increase multilingual capabilities within the EU's European Research Area (ERA). The project is using technology to advance the presence of the Turkish language in European research circles and society at large. Through advanced multilingual speech technologies and automatic translation systems, Multisaund is enhancing the research capabilities of the Multimedia Technologies Research & Development (MTRD) laboratories under Tubitak. It has already transformed the MTRD team into a strong EU partner in Turkish-oriented multilingual technologies development and research, investigating speaker recognition, audiovisual biometrics, ambient-assisted living and digital content analysis. Multisaund has also supported the MTRD team in publishing more than 20 papers, increasing its visibility substantially and attracting funding for new projects. It has enabled the laboratories to hire experienced researchers, upgrade infrastructure and form new international partnerships. These efforts will help overcome language barriers and build bridges, bringing diverse European peoples much closer to each other, with positive effects on trade, technology and market opportunities.