Sakha Tyla: How to teach a machine to understand Sakha

2021 • Directed by

Maksim Tomash

Documentary

How do you save a language that has not been spoken for a whole generation? It’s essential to use the language in chat rooms, in creating movies, blogs, and rap, and to generally use it more often on the Internet. Alexey Ivanov is an enthusiast who understood this and approached Yandex with the idea of making an online translator from the Sakha language. The task that engineers solved many times with other languages turned out to be more difficult and interesting. In addition to technology, this project needed a protagonist.