Background
Since 1993, the Education Network of Ontario/ Réseau éducatif de l'Ontario (ENO/REO) has been helping teachers to share their knowledge and improve their skills through electronic networking.
The ENO/REO is a collaborative project between the Ontario Ministry of Education and Training and the Ontario Teachers' Federation. This expanding bilingual service received funding from the Ontario Ministry of Economic Development, Trade and Tourism and continues to receive funding from the Ministry of Education and Training and other contracts. ENO/REO is a non-profit corporation with an active and knowledgeable Board of Directors.
The primary goal of ENO/REO is to enhance the school-based educator professionalism through electronic networking. To that end ENO/REO provides a wide range of telecommunication services for the JK-12/OAC education community in Ontario, including Internet access, member email accounts, student and teacher education projects and a large number of online education conferences/newsgroups. The network can also provide LAN and WAN connectivity solutions for Ontario boards of education and other public service agencies.
In early 2001, ENO/REO began looking for machine translation tools that would help its community of teachers to communicate with non-English/French speaking teachers overseas.
The challenge
ENO/REO wanted to enable Brazilian and Canadian teachers to exchange ideas and experiences about teaching via the Internet. However, the language barrier was standing in the way of real progress.
"We were starting a project to allow teachers in Brazil to communicate with teachers in Canada in online discussion forums, hosted on the Internet. Since there was a language barrier to contend with, we decided to pursue automated translation tools to allow the teachers in the two countries to communicate with each other more effectively," said James Treleaven, manager of software development at ENO/REO.
With many translation tools on the market, ENO/REO were keen to find a solution that would be cost effective to implement. In addition, the solution needed to be easy to use and had to provide fast and accurate translations from Brazilian Portuguese to French and vice versa.
WorldLingo's Solution
ENO/REO looked at a number of translation providers. Having evaluated solutions from vendors including Lernout & Hauspie, SDL and IBM's Alphaworks, ENO/REO opted for WorldLingo's Tier One Service Package. The solution provides a machine translation service that translates English to/from French, Spanish, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German to French, French to German, and French to/from Brazilian Portuguese.
"We selected WorldLingo because not only does it offer a cost effective translation solution, its staff also demonstrated a highly professional and efficient approach to our requirements. In addition, WorldLingo could offer Brazilian Portuguese as a supported language. The latter feature ensures that the nuances of Brazilian Portuguese are taken into account in the translations," commented James Treleaven.
The solution provided to ENO/REO is based on WorldLingo's Computer Aided Translation (CAT) technologies. The latest, groundbreaking software automates and accelerates various steps of the translation process. Software tools are used to build a Translation Memory (TM) as the translation progresses. These tools support a translation memory database so previous translations can be re-used. In this way, documents can be translated easily and to a high degree of accuracy.
Results
Whilst the project is in its early stages, WorldLingo's translation solutions are already helping to improve links between Canadian and Brazilian teachers. Having implemented WorldLingo's solutions successfully, ENO/REO recognizes that there is much broader scope for the use of WorldLingo's translation solutions.
"As an organization with a mandate to bring together educators with diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds, we believe that machine translation will allow us to provide our specialised services to a wider and wider group of educators," said James Treleaven. An objective in the future for ENO/REO will be to use machine translation for improved cooperation and understanding between English and French speaking Canadian teachers.
"We work in partnership with the Federal Government of Canada (Industry Canada - SchoolNet) to provide conferences/forums/newsgroups, for educators across Canada to share expertise and to work collaboratively online in topics of interest to K-12 educators. Since Canada is a bilingual country, we think that there may be room for WorldLingo's machine translation solutions to be used on this project," continued James Treleaven.
With WorldLingo's translation solutions on board, ENO/REO now has the potential to develop further projects that will improve relations between Canadian teachers and their counterparts around the world regardless of language barriers.
Read more about Translation Asset Management.