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.

The traMOOC project launched in February 2015 aims at tackling this impediment by developing high-quality automatic translation of various types of texts included in MOOCs from English into eleven European and BRIC languages.

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.

The project results will be showcased and tested on the Iversity MOOC platform and on the VideoLectures.NET digital video lecture library.

Source: OpenEducationEuropa

Note: this article was originally posted on mooc-it.com.