Project to break down online course language barriers
A project aimed at removing the language barriers to distance learning has secured over €3m in funding from Horizon 2020.
The ‘Translation for Massive Open Online Courses’, or TraMOOC, project will provide reliable machine translation for Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). By eliminating language barriers to MOOCs, it’s hoped that the project will provide previously excluded groups of people across the world with new educational opportunities.
MOOCs are online education courses aimed at unlimited participation and open access via the internet. As relatively new development in distance learning they have been growing rapidly in size and impact. Yet the language barrier constitutes a major growth impediment in reaching out to all people and educating all citizens.
TraMOOC aims to tackle this barrier by developing high-quality systems for the automatic translation of various types of texts within MOOCs – varying from video lectures, assignments and tutorial text, to social media messages posted on MOOC blogs and fora, which are currently not covered by any of the existing translation platforms. The TraMOOC online translation platform will provide translation from English into German, Italian, Portuguese, Greek, Dutch, Bulgarian, Czech, Croatian, Polish, Russian and Chinese.
Commenting, Professor Andy Way of the ADAPT Centre at Ireland’s Dublin City University, one of the consortium partners, said: “These 11 languages were chosen as they constitute strong use cases, are hard to translate into and have limited existing machine translation resources on which to build. By providing access in these languages, TraMOOC will open up online learning to potentially millions of new users, whose access to such resources is currently limited by language barriers.”
The Innovation Action project runs for three years until 2018 and is co-ordinated by the Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany. There are nine other partners in the consortium drawn from the higher education sector and industry from Belgium, Greece, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.
