CrossLang Coordinates Bologna Translation Service

CrossLang Coordinates Bologna Translation ServiceCrossLang (Ghent) coordinates a project subsidized by Europe that is to provide a qualitative and affordable online machine translation system for translation of curricula and study guides of higher education institutions by the spring of 2013.

In order to obtain the ECTS label (European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System) an increasing amount of educational institutions in Europe are compelled to provide the educational information in English. Also to attract foreign students and present themselves internationally, institutions find it crucial to be able to make this information available in English or even Chinese. Because this concerns huge volumes of text to be translated, many institutions cannot afford to translate this information manually. The Bologna Translation Service would like to offer a solution for this problem: a qualitative, affordable, online machine translation specifically designed for translation of study programs.

The development of this domain-specific machine translation system is conducted in the framework of a project (ICT PSP) cofinanced by the European Union. The Bologna Translation Service, after all, aims at consolidating the international position of the European higher education institutions. The total project cost is 3.16 million euro. The EU will contribute half (1.58 million euro).

A significant part of the project is devoted to the opening up and the collection of data for training and improving the statistical MT systems (MT = machine translation). In addition to the freely available corpora which are the result of previous projects (e.g. the Dutch Parallel Corpus), existing translations made available by the university partners will also be used.

The project partners next to CrossLang are Convertus (Sweden), Applied Language Solutions (UK), the University of Koç (Turkey) and Eleka Ingeniaritza Lingusitikoa (Spain).
Convertus, a spin-off of the University of Uppsala, previously developed the Syllabus Translator for the Swedish market of higher education, a domain-specific adaptation of a machine translation system developed by a university research group. The Syllabus Translator translates syllabi and course information from Swedish in English. The Syllabus Translator is used in various Swedish universities.
The Bologna Translation Service can be regarded as an extension of the Syllabus Translator with translation capacities from Finnish, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish and German into English and from English into Chinese.

Interested institutions of higher education can join the Bologna User Group.

CrossLang (the new name of Cross Language) is a consulting firm that specializes in the automation of translation and localization processes in large organizations. The company exists for ten years and is led by Heidi Depraetere and Luc Meertens.


More info: www.bologna-translation.eu


More info: www.crosslang.com


(dd - 13/1/2012)


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Author: Dries Debackere

Machine translation: SDL Machine Translation (previously SDL BeGlobal)

Post-editing: Lennart Tondeleir

Source language: Nederlands (nl)


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