BOLOGNA TRANSLATION SERVICE: MAKING STUDY PROGRAMMES ACCESSIBLE THROUGHOUT EUROPE BY MEANS OF HIGH-QUALITY AUTOMATED TRANSLATION

There is a continuing 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 degree to which universities effectively attract students and, more importantly, has an impact on international profiling. To present all educational information in English is a major challenge for most higher education institutes.

The regulatory environments in the context of the Bologna treaty combined with budget constraints and limited human resources make it very difficult for universities to deliver English (and Chinese) documentation, which affects their capacity to promote their services locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally. Confronted with the ECTS requirements, many universities now spend vast amounts of money and time in providing traditional human translated documents.

As European Higher Education and European Research are two pillars of the knowledge-based society, the Bologna Translation Service (BTS) project received funding under the European Union's ICT Policy Support Programme and aims at providing a solution to this problem by offering a low-cost, web-based, high-quality machine translation (MT) service. The first phase of the project will include the automatic translation of syllabi, study programmes, diploma supplements and student application forms from 7 local languages (German, Spanish, Finnish, French, Dutch, Portuguese, and Turkish) to English and from English to Chinese.

The BTS approach will be to integrate existing MT components into a web-based collaboration framework. The basis will be statistical MT (SMT) engines for all language pairs. Baseline SMT systems created using the Moses toolkit will be further refined and improved by adding in data from the educational domain and applying domain adaptation and automated and human post-editing. For a selected number of language pairs system combination will be applied in order to further improve translation quality.

By making study programmes more accessible to potentially interested parties, BTS will help to make degrees and qualifications more visible to the labour market, and to identify career opportunities and stimulate the research needed to increase European competitiveness.

In this paper, we first describe the motivating factors behind the provision of such a service. Following this, we provide an overview of the BTS framework and it current implementation status. Advanced MT systems have now been built for all languages and are being fine-tuned by adding automatic post-editing modules. In parallel with the back-end developments, the first version of the service’s front-end is being revamped and extended.