EU funded projects

transLectures

transLectures is an EU-funded project to develop innovative, cost-effective tools for the automatic transcription and translation of online educational videos.

Online collections of video material are fast becoming a staple feature of the Internet and a key educational resource. What we are working on at transLectures is a set of easy-to-use tools that will allow users to add multilingual subtitles to these videos. In doing so, they will make the content of these videos available to a much wider audience in a way that is cost-effective and sustainable over the vast collections of online video lectures being generated.

Automatic transcription tools will provide verbatim subtitles of the talks recorded on video, thereby allowing the hard-of-hearing to access this content. Language learners and other non-native speakers will also benefit from these monolingual subtitles. Meanwhile, machine translation tools will make these subtitles available in languages other than that in which the video was recorded.

Specifically, we will be developing tools for use on VideoLectures.NET, a collection of videos recorded at various academic events set up by JSI’s Centre for Knowledge Transfer, and for poliMedia, a lecture capture system designed and implemented at the UPVLC. Our tools will also be fully compatible with Matterhorn, a free, open-source platform for the management of educational audio and video content

The language pairs being targeted in this project are English, Spanish and Slovenian for transcription, and English<>Spanish, English<>Slovenian, English>French and English>German for translation

Mission

The foundation promotes the spread of knowledge and vivid academic debate to anyone with access to the internet anywhere in the world. It therefore benefits all those interested in academic knowledge and debate, where they do not currently have immediate access to such resources and debate. It also helps to develop more widespread interest in such resources and debate.
The Foundation promotes the open access to academic resources (such as video lectures, learning objects, paper, reports, books, and scientific data), together with tools to give users access to these resources and to match them to their needs. Furthermore, the Foundation aims to help overcome the barriers of limited discoverability and accessibility, as well as enable interaction between users and providers, and among users with common interests.

The Foundation is a forum where creators, technology developers, managers and users of such resources and tools can meet to actively promote the free availability and distribution of such content and tools, as well as develop strategies for fostering interactions between users and providers and among users with common interests.

The Foundation has its main office in London, England, but it operates globally together with a subsidiary “Zavod Znanje za Vse” in Ljubljana, Slovenia, responsible for infrastructure development as well as the maintenance and development of an exemplar site, videolectures.net.