multilingualism
Duolingo
Duolingo is a free language-learning website and crowdsourced text translation platform. The service is designed so that as users progress through the lessons they simultaneously help to translate websites and other documents. Currently, the site offers only Spanish and German courses for English speakers, though it has plans to expand to French, Italian and Chinese in the future. Duolingo launched in private beta on November 30, 2011, and has accumulated a waiting list of more than 100,000 users. As of December 22, 2011, the service has translated over 24,000 sentences.
European CLIL Resource Centre for Web2.0 Education: Early-to-Long life
E-CLIL is European Union funded project to develop and build resources and a resource centre for the use of Content Language Integrated Learning (CLIL).
It focuses on language learning, learning strategies, multilingualism and multiculturalism. The project is being completed over 3 years and includes partners with a wide-experience of how to create CLIL content and the issues around CLIL.
There is an urgent need for specific materials, resources and guidelines for implementation which guarantee excellence in language learning. The mission of E-CLIL is to improve the quality of language teaching through the use of CLIL to drive the need for Europeans to speak their mother tongue plus two foreign languages.
The project process
The CLIL Centre has a three objectives:
- It will provide support to current and future CLIL education programmes all over Europe
- It will disseminate high quality and already proven materials and resources for content and language learning
- It will enrich teachers’ and children’s knowledge of other European cultures.
The project will build interactive activities, tasks and games, within a storyline, for the use of CLIL teachers. These will be translated in to the project languages.
The project will also build links and include resources to other evaluated CLIL resources across Europe.
There will be opportunities for educators around Europe to engage with the project through social network groups, by providing CLIL resources for evaluation and by using the resources produced by the project.
Study on the use of Subtitling - The potential of subtitling to encourage foreign language learning and improve the mastery of foreign languages
Can the use of subtitles on television and at the cinema help viewers to learn foreign languages?
A study ordered by the European Commission in the framework of its policy for multilingualism analysed the potential of subtitling to encourage language learning and improve the mastery of foreign languages. A sample of 6 000 persons covering a total of 33 countries (European Union and Iceland, Norway, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Croatia and Turkey) as well as 5 000 students from this same zone were asked about their viewing habits, their preference for dubbing or subtitling and their language skills. According to this survey, subtitling helps to improve foreign language skills and can also create awareness and provide motivation to learn languages, in both formal and informal contexts, thus contributing to the creation of an environment that encourages multilingualism.
Internet Translators for all European Languages
Our mission is to highlight quality and to increase confidence in machine translation.
Challenge
Multilingualism is deeply embedded in the concept of the European Union. The rapid and spectacular advances in ICT technologies (in particular mobile communication and the internet) have made an unprecedented amount of content available online, which is increasingly multilingual. This has raised the need to address the problem of removing language barriers in order to make multilingual web content widely accessible. A key technology that plays a vital part in this objective is machine translation (MT).
Developing quality machine translation software is a huge scientific and financial effort, mainly due to the quantity of linguistic resources required; therefore most MT companies focus on only a few languages which are relevant for their targeted markets. As a result, there is currently no easily accessible full-coverage MT solution for all EU languages. Recently Google has published its own machine translation service that provides translation from any European language to any other - all in one place and free of charge, which gives them a huge competitive edge. However, the overall quality of their translation is often inferior to that of other MT solutions for many European languages.
Goal
This project intends to provide a viable alternative as it doesn't offer only full coverage of EU languages, but also provides for each language pair the best quality available at the time and mediates easy transfer to professional translators. The project is carried out by a consortium of European MT companies that have developed the best translation system for at least one language pair. Invitation to the consortium was based upon preliminary tests. All of the companies with the best test scores were invited and all of them decided to pool their expertise and resources to set up a common web service that will provide quality machine translation services for most EU language pairs. Quality will be assured by continuous supervision and evaluation resulting in competition between different providers on the site.
Innovation
A common API makes clear for all participants the present technical requirements of such services. Positive impacts of the standard interfaces are expected, which are relying on existing standards like Unicode, XML, HTLM, HTTP and AJAX.
The evaluation and comparison of the services leads also to innovation. Providers have a better view of the differences of the systems. The recognition of weaknesses usually leads to immediate innovations. Availability of more than one translator for the same language pair opens a new field for improvements. Evaluation and ranking systems were implemented in the project.
The result
The project developed the first European website that provides free online translation from any European language to any other. Moreover, through the competitive approaches, users are ensured to use the best quality translator available.
Impact
Providing such a system to internet users for free is an important step towards accomplishing the "progressive abolition of language barriers in accessing multilingual content on the Web". In addition, the consortium hopes that other service providers will also recognize the advantages of this partnership and join the project. Furthermore, an additional impact on professional translators is expected, as more and more translation memory software integrates machine translation, and if this service becomes integrated into translation memories it will make an impact on the efficiency with which professional translators can work and initiate the long awaited change in the industrial utilization of machine translation.
Experiences with the Learning Resource Exchange for schools in Europe
Concerning educational content, this paper reports on the use of open content licenses and the difficulties of implementing them; the indexing of content by experienced professionals and by casual users; automatic translation and automatic metadata generation, and perceived pedagogical benefits of the resources provided.
By implementing and using a portal for the LRE, European teachers have obtained deeper insights in searching and browsing, finding the offered learning resources useful for the classroom and appreciating the cross-linguistic and cross-border use of content. The concept of an international portal was also considered as an important opportunity for cultural exchange and a way to broaden horizons in terms of getting new ideas for teaching from other countries.