traMOOC – Translation for Massive Open Online Courses

Massive Open Online Courses have been growing rapidly in size and impact. Yet the language barrier constitutes a major growth impediment in reaching out to all peoples and educating all citizens.

TraMOOC is a H2020 project to start in February 2015 and aims at tackling this impediment by developing high-quality translation of all types of text genre included in MOOCs (e.g. assignments, tests, presentations, lecture subtitles, blog text) from English into eleven European and BRIC languages (DE, IT, PT, EL, DU, CS, BG, CR, PL, RU, ZH) that constitute strong use cases, are hard to translate into and have weak MT support, thus complying with the call objectives. Phrase-based and syntax-based statistical machine translation models will be developed for addressing language diversity and supporting the language-independent nature of the  methodology.

For a high quality, automatic translation approach and for adding value to existing infrastructure, extensive advanced bootstrapping of new resources will be performed. An innovative multi-modal automatic and human evaluation schema will further ensure translation quality. For human evaluation, an innovative, strict-access control, time- and cost-efficient crowdsourcing setup will be used. Translation experts, domain experts and end users will also be involved

Case studies in the project into which the results will be showcased and tested are the openHPI MOOC platform and the VideoLectures.Net digital video lecture library.

Keywords:

statistical machine translation, MOOCs, topic detection, sentiment analysis, English, German, Italian, Portuguese, Bulgarian, Croatian, Polish, Greek, Dutch, Czech, Russian, Chinese, crowdsourcing

Visit the project website.

List of Beneficiaries:

1 Humboldt-Universitaet Zu Berlin – UBER
2 Dublin City University – DCU
3 The University of Edinburgh – UEDIN
4 Ionian University – IURC
5 Stichting Katholieke Universiteit
6 Easn Technology Innovation Services Bvba – EASN TIS
7 Deluxe Media Europe Ltd
8 Stichting Katholieke Universiteit Brabant Universiteit Van Tilburg
9 Knowledge 4 All Foundation