Gaelic Comprehension Technical Supports

Since its inception two years ago the CIALL project has been supporting the ongoing recording of fluent speakers with close connections to remaining Gaelic communities. Added value is given to these ethnographic records of community members’ thoughts, memories, and reflections through the provision of supplementary supports to comprehension for both learners and non-speakers of Gaelic. The Island Voices project has now published online a single point of reference through which this technologically enhanced archive can be accessed.

Island Voices has worked closely, firstly with Soillse and latterly with CIALL, on building a style of video documentation to capture empathetic ethnographic insights into the lived experience of 21st Century community-based Gaelic speakers. This recording model was first tried out with the Saoghal Thormoid collection and subsequently developed and expanded in the Stòras Beò nan Gàidheal project.

In the latest “Shortcuts” iteration, new longform recordings have also been broken up into shorter sections and supplemented with learning and comprehension aids for the benefit of non-fluent learners and non-speakers of Gaelic. The Island Voices “Gaelic Shorts” blogpost gives detail on the various technical options made available, and further explains how and why it’s been done. The “Shortcuts” page provides tables of links to over 40 video clips.

As with previous similar projects, for example Leacan, it is anticipated that this closely transcribed video material can also contribute to collaborative work in other centres on Gaelic corpus development and NLP (natural language processing).