@inproceedings{soto-etal-2025-zubidasoa,
    title = "{Z}u{B}idasoa: Participatory Research for the Development of Linguistic Technologies Adapted to the Needs of Migrants in the {B}asque Country",
    author = "Soto, Xabier  and
      Egurtzegi, Ander  and
      Oronoz, Maite  and
      Etxeberria, Urtzi",
    editor = {Bouillon, Pierrette  and
      Gerlach, Johanna  and
      Girletti, Sabrina  and
      Volkart, Lise  and
      Rubino, Raphael  and
      Sennrich, Rico  and
      L{\"a}ubli, Samuel  and
      Volk, Martin  and
      Espl{\`a}-Gomis, Miquel  and
      Vandeghinste, Vincent  and
      Moniz, Helena  and
      Szoc, Sara},
    booktitle = "Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XX: Volume 2",
    month = jun,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Geneva, Switzerland",
    publisher = "European Association for Machine Translation",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/mtsummit-25-ingestion/2025.mtsummit-2.9/",
    pages = "75--76",
    ISBN = "978-2-9701897-1-8",
    abstract = "Recent years have witnessed the development of advanced language technologies, including the use of audio and images as part of multimodal systems. However, these models are not adapted to the specific needs of migrants and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) communicating in multilingual scenarios. In this project, we focus on the situation of migrants arriving in the Basque Country, nearby the western border between Spain and France. For identifying migrants' needs, we have met with several organisations helping them in different stages, including: sea rescue; primary care in refugee camps and in situ; assistance with asylum demands; other administrative issues; and human rights defence in retention centres. In these interviews, Darija has been identified as the most spoken language among the under-served ones. Considering this, we have started the development of a Machine Translation (MT) system between Basque and Darija (Moroccan Arabic), based on open-source corpora. In this paper, we present the description of the project and the main results of the participatory research developed in the initial stage."
}