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Bologna Translation Service (Bologna)
Start date: Mar 1, 2011, End date: Feb 28, 2013 PROJECT  FINISHED 

There is a continuing and 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 level to which universities effectively attract foreign students and, more importantly, has an impact on international profiling. However, to present all education information in English is a major challenge for most higher education institutes. The figures and trends show that investment in traditional human translation services is prohibitive, consequently course materials and degree programmes are often provided in the local language only.The proposed project aims at providing a solution to this problem by offering a low-cost, web-based, high-quality machine translation (MT) service, the Bologna Translation Service (BTS). The project will make use of experiences and technology from a high-quality MT service currently in use by several Swedish universities and provided by one of the BTS partners. Although there are many existing generic machine translation services none produces good enough quality for the syllabi purpose. The project will cover nine (9) languages (Chinese, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish). We estimate the number of prospective users to be over 1000 universities in the context of our project, and some 2500 in a European context. Further, we assume that major European universities have between 5,000 and 10,000 course syllabi each in need for translation.The Bologna Translation Service will deploy mature technology. Both statistical and rule-based solutions will be applied by the translation engines. Co-operation with on-going European initiatives will be sought. The service will be accessible through a web-interface and accessing the relevant University database where course syllabi and degree programs are produced and edited.
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