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Short abstract

Localization from below: how grassroots activists and computer scientists translate and maintain platform interfaces in Sardinian, navigating absent linguistic standards, fast release cycles, and the constant risk of losing their language online.

Long abstract

This presentation explores the management and maintenance of digital platform interfaces in Sardinian, a European minoritized language. Digital platforms and information infrastructures increasingly mediate linguistic presence and recognition, yet for languages such as Sardinian the process of localization is neither systematic nor institutionally supported. Instead, it relies largely on the initiative of active minorities, grassroots activists, and computer scientists who engage in “localization from below”, after an agreement with the platforms adiministrations. Through their efforts, platform interfaces are translated, adapted, and maintained in ways that reflect both the opportunities and the fragilities of digital infrastructures. A central challenge arises from the absence of widely accepted linguistic standards in Sardinian, which complicates translation practices and undermines the potential use of automatic translation tools.

More broadly, one can wonder whether the language itself is modified in the process of fitting into platforms interfaces. In this process, where tokenization is increasingly important, work on language relies less on lexicography and more on morphological approaches.

Platforms release at least ten version per year. Activists and loosely organized groups struggle to keep up with this rithm and face the constant risk of losing an interface in their language, replaced by the English one. This dynamic illustrated the difference between structured maintenance work and the same activity carried out at the margin of corporation and OECD countries.

By examining these dynamics, the presentation highlights how digital infrastructures both reproduce and reshape conditions of linguistic marginalization, while also creating new spaces for activism and experimentation.