Language Technologies

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BOLOGNA - Bologna Translation Service

270915 - Pilot B

At a glance

PSP -2009.6.2 - Multilingual online services Duration: 24 months Start date: 1 March 2011 End date: 28 February 2013 Project officer: Aleksandra Wesololwska» website Annual Report 2011 Factsheet

Challenge

There is a continuing increasing need for educational institutes to provide course syllabi documentation and other educational information in English. Access to translated course syllabi and degree programmes plays a crucial role in the degree to which universities effectively attract foreign students and, more importantly, has an impact on international profiling.

Due to budget and time constraints, a large amount of syllabi and study programmes end up being published in the local language only and translated versions are never made available.

Goal

The Bologna Translation Service aims to overcome these problems by providing a low-cost, web-based, high-quality machine translation (MT) service.

The service will be accessible through a web-interface and will expose a web services API providing connectivity to universities’ local content repositories where course syllabi and degree programmes are produced and edited.

Innovation

The high translation quality of the Bologna project will be achieved through the use of front-edge technological achievements in machine translation (a combination of statistical and rule-based methods), domain-adaptation of the translation engines, the use of automatic post-editing facilities, manual editing and a memory function. The automatic post-editing facilities and the memory function will increase the translation quality gradually as the service is being used, and the need for manual post-editing will decrease.

The result

The Bologna Translation Service will build a highly specialised domain-focused automated translation service that integrates typologically different MT technologies with translation memory (TM) technology making use of automated post-editing (PE) techniques into a web-based collaboration platform.

Impact

By making use of customisation, integration and validation techniques to improve the quality output of MT, the Bologna Translation Service will allow citizens, institutions and businesses, to get access to university study programmes previously unknown to them. The Bologna Translation Service will help to increase student mobility. This service will play a role in making degrees, qualifications and awards visible to the labour market, identifying career opportunities and stimulating the research needed to increase European competitiveness. These principles have been clearly identified by the European Commission in the Sorbonne and Bologna Declarations, Lisbon Strategy and the Modernisation Agenda.

Where will the project be present?

The Bologna project will present a paper at INTED2012 (http://www.iated.org/inted2012/announcement) to be held in Valencia, Spain 6-8 March 2012. (http://www.iated.org/concrete2/list_accepted_abstracts.php?event_id=12&search_id=&search_title=&search_author=Depraetere&search_bool=and)
INTED2012 is the 6th International Technology, Education and Development Conference. The aim of the conference is to promote international collaboration in Education and Research in all educational fields and disciplines. The attendance of more than 700 delegates from 70 different countries is expected.

The project will also have a stand at the European Association for International Education (EAIE) annual conference taking place in Dublin, 11-14 September 2012 (http://www.eaie.org/dublin/). The European Association for International Education annually hosts the largest international higher education conference in Europe, providing an open arena for international professionals involved in all aspects of higher education to exchange ideas, learn from best practices and debate policies and hot topics in the field.

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