The Roma minority is one of the largest ethnic minorities in Europe. Out of an estimated 10 to 12 million Roma living in Europe, approximately 6 million are citizens or residents of the EU.

It’s also one of the most discriminated. Historically enslaved and persecuted, Roma people are caught in a vicious circle of poverty reinforced by segregation.

Language is no different. While the community loves to speak their native language, it is a mostly spoken language. But sometimes they even avoid it because just speaking it draws more and more hate.

Romani language is invisible. Even to Google. It is nowhere to be found in the available for translation language section, among the hundreds of options. Despite being spoken by millions of people.

The mission for Vice, who often covered the subject editorially, was to validate the culture and help protect the linguistic roots, by eliminating the stigma.

To complete our objectives, we turned to the biggest legitimization tool we knew- most popular internet machine Google. We knew that in order for the translation Ai to learn Romani language and be able to index it, we needed a large amount of written translated content that was inexistent.

So we started the collection effort on all grounds.

Under the mantra “Google Learns Romani”, we activated the community and rallied up to gather as many translations from them.

We also created a new language domain RR, where you could find translated content that could be read in Romani- on Vice, but then on many other news outlets. Basically, instead of campaigning to make Google pay attention to the subject and put pressure on them to start the indexation process- we just started doing it ourselves, putting in the work and making it big enough that Google would hear about it.

We activated the community to gather as much translation data. On International Roma day,we mobilized the Roma locals to translate sentence by sentence, in a media marathon that has a mass audience..

To enlarge the translation base, we mirrored our own editorial content in Romani- tens of articles were translated and added to our huge collect.

Then we targeted media outlets to join and do the same. We targeted huge players with personalized messaging from the community. Some of them listened and joined with own translation content.

With all this collection behind, we were able to approach and target Google with a “we’ve done this so far attitude”- they paid attention and now Romani has a huge chance to be featured in the official indexation process.

We launched a campaign website, a social media profile and a documentary film about the situation, featuring prominent members of the local Roma community.

All these major campaign building blocks had one scope in mind: rallying people to translate and gather as much content.

A huge local news marathon on International Roma day, on one of the most viewed channels in Romania- has the important mission of teaching people how to use the platform and submit translations for the AI to be able to learn.

We used our own website, Vice.com, as a translation headquarter also, with heavy translated editorial content. Also we used social media targeting as a way to gather more translations from big international media outlets.

The big national rally to gather translated data was featured on no less than 65 minutes of live air time, debated by a large number of guests and capturing a large mass audience. Almost 1 million viewers have seen the subject covered.

Vice was joined by other 5 major international media outlets in mirroring its online content: Forbes and Elle being two of them.

The effort aimed gathered over 10.000 sentences in Romani, which can be used as a strong base going further in the AI indexation process.

The effort contributed to the largest database in the online space, for Romani translations.

This helped change perspective that Romani is less of a language and that people who speak it have less of a culture.

Vice was established again as a fighter against discrimination and protector of culture.