Mitigating Language Barriers in Education: Developing Multilingual Digital Learning Materials with Machine Translation
This addresses the needs of non-Czech-speaking students in Czech primary and secondary schools, though it is incremental as it applies existing machine translation methods to a new educational domain.
The EdUKate project tackled the problem of language barriers in Czech schools by developing multilingual digital learning materials, resulting in a machine translation system that translated up to 9,000 exercises into Ukrainian, English, and German for a freely available educational portal.
The EdUKate project combines digital education, linguistics, translation studies, and machine translation to develop multilingual learning materials for Czech primary and secondary schools. Launched through collaboration between a major Czech academic institution and the country's largest educational publisher, the project is aimed at translating up to 9,000 multimodal interactive exercises from Czech into Ukrainian, English, and German for an educational web portal. It emphasizes the development and evaluation of a direct Czech-Ukrainian machine translation system tailored to the educational domain, with special attention to processing formatted content such as XML and PDF and handling technical and scientific terminology. We present findings from an initial survey of Czech teachers regarding the needs of non-Czech-speaking students and describe the system's evaluation and implementation on the web portal. All resulting applications are freely available to students, educators, and researchers.