Neural Machine Translation 4 Education
Cracking the language barrier for education in UNESCO Member States, with special focus on developing countries that have "fragmentary" or "weak/no" machine translation support for educational texts
Background: The idea of a multilingual world is becoming truly a reality, as sophisticated monolingual, cross-lingual and multilingual language technologies have been created and have immensely optimized the translation quality and language/topic coverage in real-life situations.
However, a major challenge resides in respecting the plural diversity of all world regions residing in their languages and cultures yet avoiding all forms of education, research and business fragmentation linked to those same assets. Another is the relationship between the EU’s language technologies for the Digital Single Market and its connection with other language markets, which is also a major opportunity the field had in the last couple of years.
Specific Challenge: The challenge is to facilitate multilingual online communication in developing countries specifically in the domain of education, and enable it with the technologies developed in the EU, currently leading in this field, by taking down existing language barriers. These barriers hamper wider penetration of cross-border education, commerce, social communication and exchange of cultural content.
Additionally, current machine translation solutions typically perform well only for a limited number of target languages, and for a given text type. The potential for a value added global action in creating access to educational content with machine translation acting as a bridge between national educational systems is enormous.
Specific Solution: The Knowledge 4 All Foundation solved the problem of mass translation in education by developing TransLexy, a robust service that provides translation from English into nine European and two BRIC, languages, namely:
- English → Bulgarian (Български)
- English → Czech (Čeština)
- English → German (Deutsch)
- English → Greek (Ελληνικά)
- English → Croatian (Hrvatski)
- English → Italian (Italiano)
- English → Dutch (Nederlands)
- English → Polish (Polszczyzna)
- English → Portuguese (Português)
- English → Russian (Русский)
- English → Chinese (漢語, 汉语)
The platform is intended to overcome the existing language barriers in education, and can deal with huge volumes, high variety of languages and education text styles, and deliver results in reasonable time (in most cases, instantly).
Moving forward: The Foundation will add to its portfolio in partnership with the University of Edinburgh the following language pairs:
- English → Afaan Oromo
- English → Tigrinya
- English → Igbo
- English → Yoruba
- English → Gujarati
- English → Punjabi
- Kurdish→ English
- North Korean → English
- Hausa → English
- Swahili→ English
