The Annual Meeting of Directors of the Cervantes Institute closes its sessions with the challenge of digitisation

The Annual Meeting of the Directors of the Cervantes Institute ended on Wednesday with the presentation of the conclusions, in which a priority issue came to the fore: the challenge of digitisation and adaptation to the new technological scenario. The Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, highlighted in a recorded video the "need to optimise the potential of Spanish" by taking advantage of the technological revolution and artificial intelligence, the use of which "opens up a whole horizon of possibilities". We are, said José Manuel Albares, at a "moment of transcendental historical change" in which "the Spanish language can and must become a driving force for employment, entrepreneurship, technology and economic growth". 

The Plenary Hall of the Granada City Hall was the setting chosen to hold this last session, which brings to an end three days of debates, inaugurated by Queen Letizia last Monday, in which the challenges, achievements, shortcomings and functioning of the institution have been examined in depth. 

The director, Luis García Montero, who these days advanced the convenience of modernising the organisation and thinking about new projects to face the future, said that "our heart remains in Granada", his home city, and thanked the hospitality, which "is a round trip". 

García Montero left the spotlight to the Secretary General, Carmen Noguero, at the close of the sessions, in which the Mayor of the host city, Francisco Cuenca, expressed his gratitude for the meeting of the seventy Cervantes directors. 

Noguero predicted that the digital transformation "will lead us to much reflection" and that this transition, embodied in an ambitious strategic plan for digitisation, may generate hard times, with difficulties of adaptation and a heavy workload. For this reason, the issues discussed these days in Granada must be passed on to the employees of the centres. Their involvement should also be sought in order to create a new network of international connections between them, which makes the most of the "distinctive value" of Cervantes: being a network that is present all over the world. 

The Minister of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation said that "the digital reality has definitively settled among us". "The enormous effort we have made to adapt to the virtual environment prepares us to face new challenges" and "will provide us with a solid base to take advantage of all the opportunities of the virtual". Among them, the so-called PERTE New Economy of the Language, whose key piece for the development of strategies to promote Spanish will be the Global Observatory, based in La Rioja. 

As for the functioning of Cervantes, Albares stated that "it has managed to become our best tool for promoting the teaching, study and use of Spanish, contributing to the expansion of Hispanic cultures abroad". 2022 has been the year of the recovery of face-to-face activity, of the return to normality and the reactivation of the examining work for obtaining Spanish diplomas, he said. And also "the year of expansion" with the consolidation of the centres in Dakar (Senegal), the opening of Los Angeles (United States) and the approval of Seoul (Republic of Korea). All of this reflects the Government's commitment to being present in important areas for the dissemination of the Hispanic language and culture. 

This session at the Granada City Hall brought to an end the annual meeting, which on Wednesday included three working sessions. The last of these focused on artificial intelligence (AI) in Spanish, language processing and conversational systems against disinformation, led by two full professors from the University of Granada: Juan Gómez and Zoraida Callejas. 

Juan Gómez, from the Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, explained to the Cervantes staff the functioning and progress of AI, its programmes and algorithms. AI systems work with computational techniques based on the studies of neural networks unravelled by the Nobel Prize winner Ramón y Cajal, applied mathematically to computer language. 

The human language application models are a special type of neural network trained to work with texts, capable of "learning" and predicting a sequence of words from one, to generate longer and more complete texts. With an increasing use of Spanish (a few years ago almost all of them were in English), these models are used as a basis for other tasks such as text classification or machine translation with a corpus of parallel texts. They still have limitations, errors and non-transparent behaviour, but they can be very effective and fast. 

Zoraida Callejas, lecturer in the Department of Languages and Computer Systems at the University of Granada, spoke about conversational computer systems, including well-known virtual assistants such as Siri or Alexa. Given that oral or written interaction is growing, and that we will increasingly carry out more and more tasks by talking to machines, it is important that they are available in Spanish, with tools specifically created for our language. 

She insisted that the different variants of Spanish should be included and that the synthetic voice that clones the human voice should pick up this wealth of speech, which "is not always on the agenda of the big technology companies". We must also work to eliminate bias, respect privacy to "anonymise" the voices and include common sense, refining the content of the arguments offered when asked certain questions. 

After Tuesday's sessions, in which the Digitalisation Plan was discussed, on Wednesday questions were raised about the commercialisation of online courses, a type of teaching that has been on the rise in the wake of the pandemic and confinement, although face-to-face Spanish courses have made a comeback. The coexistence of both teaching models generates debates on the most convenient price and cost structure in the different centres, the convenience or otherwise of centralised management, competition between centres, how to advertise online courses, etc. These are important issues because enrolments for classes, both online and face-to-face, are one of Cervantes' main sources of income, together with certification (Spanish diplomas). 

In the session on institutional collaborations, the Director General of Spanish in the World (of the Secretary of State for Ibero-America) admitted that it is necessary to fight to defend the presence of Spanish in international organisations: Spanish is disappearing as a working language in the secretariats of many organisations where the English-French binomial is well established. Guillermo Escribano therefore encouraged collaboration with the "Friends of Spanish", NGOs and other voluntary groups and associations. 

Other speakers included the delegate in Spain of the Instituto Cero y Cuervo (Colombia), Martín Gómez, who expressed his gratitude for the projection achieved thanks to the cooperation with Cervantes, which dates back to October 2014; and the Vice-Rector for International Relations of the University of Granada, Dorothy Anne Kelly, who called for greater cooperation and cultural symbiosis, especially in the offer for her students of internships at Cervantes centres. 

After the concluding session, the singer Miguel Ríos presented Luis García Montero with a bequest for the Cervantes' Caja de las Letras in the Isabel la Católica Theatre. The artist from Granada also gave the concert "Vuelvo a Granada" accompanied by the Black Betty Band, Antonio Arias and Anni B Sweet. 

The Cervantes Directors' Meeting has been organised with the collaboration of the University of Granada, the Granada City Council, the Fuente Vaqueros City Council and Renfe (official train of the Annual Meeting). 

Submitted by José Antonio Sierra, Hispanismo advisor.