Agroecology for farmers: the linguistic issue addressed

Summary

Agroecology considers that agriculture is a part of ecological systems to promote biodiversity and to support multicultural production as both a practice and a field of scientific study. In addition to a remarkable increase in the information resources, farmers are also starting to benefit from the ongoing development of technologies that enable them to access information. Although internet access to information resources is becoming less problematic even in isolated areas, the issue of language barrier is particularly critical in benefiting intercultural information and communicating between farmer communities. This chapter focuses on the need for farmers to access useful information, not because of any technical problems but rather due to language barriers. This chapter addresses the linguistic issue using the Organic Edunet experience. Organic.Edunet (www.organic-edunet.eu) is a learning portal that provides access to high-quality and trusted digital learning resources on organic agriculture and agroecology. These resources are of appropriate use by students, teachers and farmers, as well as the general public interested in the subject. It is used in this chapter as a use-case for analysing the benefit of truly multilingual portal in the agroecological field. Automated multilingual services introduced in the portal are described as well as the study of the analytics that shows the need to access information without the language barrier. A professional approach is described for demonstrating the benefit for farmers and teachers to use such thematic and multilingual portal. Then the importance of new content is mentioned to ensure the update of the information as well as the sustainability of such tools.