multilingualism
First European Survey on Language Competences
This document reports the main findings from the first European Survey on Language Competences.
La UOC presenta las conclusiones del proyecto EUNoM
Las universidades europeas tienen que redefinir sus modelos de multilingüismo para adaptarse a los retos de la globalización y aprovechar mejor las posibilidades de las herramientas TIC en los ambientes de aprendizaje en línea.
Las universidades europeas han de apostar más por el multilingüismo porque potencia la creatividad y la competitividad de los alumnos. Esto implica que no solo deben aprovechar mejor las herramientas TIC que ya existen para facilitar el aprendizaje y el trabajo en línea en diferentes idiomas, sino que también tendrían que proponerse desarrollar estas tecnologías. Esta es una de las principales conclusiones del proyecto EUNoM, que la Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) ha coordinado durante tres años y en el que han participado numerosas universidades europeas y reconocidos expertos internacionales con la financiación de la Unión Europea. Las recomendaciones finales se presentan hoy en el Parlamento Europeo, acto que pondrá fin al proyecto.
Según explica Miquel Strubell, director de la Cátedra de Multilingüismo de la UOC y coordinador de EUNoM, este proyecto académico también recomienda que:
- El mundo universitario se reoriente hacia el multilingüismo y la multiculturalidad como retos y valores estratégicos.
- Los agentes de la llamada triple hélice (gobierno, empresa y universidad) sean conscientes de la importancia del multilingüismo para mejorar la competitividad en el contexto actual de la globalización y la economía del conocimiento, en contraste con la tendencia al alza de establecer un modelo uniformizador con el inglés como lingua franca dominante.
- Para crear alternativas a este modelo monolingüe, las universidades impulsen investigaciones sobre los diferentes modelos de multilingüismo que sirvan para vertebrar mejor los planes de estudio y el aprendizaje de idiomas en línea.
- Las universidades hagan comprender a empresas y empresarios que estos modelos de aprendizaje multicultural les ayudarán a captar un talento más creativo y, sobre todo, más capacitado para comprender los respectivos mercados nacionales.
Con relación a la necesidad de desarrollar las tecnologías necesarias para poder trabajar en entornos de trabajo en línea multilingües, subrayada por estas recomendaciones finales, Miquel Strubell apunta que «es un campo en el que la UOC podría liderar las investigaciones, por el conocimiento que ha acumulado a lo largo de quince años de enseñanza con este tipo de herramientas TIC. La experiencia adquirida en aulas virtuales bilingües se tendrá que extender a nuevas combinaciones de lenguas y aulas trilingües, con las herramientas que hemos estado desarrollando para hacer traducciones asistidas por ordenador».
El Proyecto EUNoM también destaca en las conclusiones la necesidad de «reunir a destacados especialistas» para reorientar el aprendizaje de idiomas y la enseñanza, a la luz de los cambios sociales y globales, y «de profundizar en la investigación sobre el proceso de lenguaje en la creatividad y las habilidades asociadas».
En este sentido, la Cátedra de Multilingüismo de la UOC tiene previsto diseñar un ambicioso proyecto de investigación financiado por la UE, que bajo el título «El reto del multilingüismo para el ciudadano europeo» estudiaría todas las implicaciones que se derivan de este nuevo contexto sociocultural a todos los niveles y de una manera transversal, y las mejores fórmulas para solucionarlas.
25 de octubre de 2012
Enlaces relacionados:
Universitat Oberta de Catalunya: www.uoc.edu
Linguamón-UOC Cátedra de Multilinguismo: http://www.uoc.edu/portal/es/catedra_multilinguisme/index.html
EUNoM - European Universities Network on Multilingualism: http://www.uoc.edu/portal/es/catedra_multilinguisme/recerca/projectes/eunom/index.html
The UOC presents the conclusions of the EUNoM project
European universities have to redefine their multilingual models to adapt to the challenges of globalization and make better use of the possibilities offered by ICT tools in e-learning environments
European universities have to make a greater commitment to multilingualism as it enhances student creativity and competitiveness. This means that not only must they make better use of existing ICT tools to aid learning and online work in different languages, but they should also consider developing these technologies. This is one of the principal conclusions of the European Union funded EUNoM project, which the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) has been coordinating for three years and in which numerous European universities and acclaimed international experts have participated. The final recommendations were presented to the European Parliament last 18th October, which will mark the culmination of the project.
According to Miquel Strubell, director of the UOC Chair in Multilingualism and coordinator of EUNoM, the academic project also recommends that:
- Universities refocus on multilingualism and multiculturalism as strategic challenges and values.
- The agents of the so-called triple helix of university, industry and government be aware of the importance of multilingualism to improve their competitiveness in the present context of globalization and the knowledge economy, in contrast with the growing trend of establishing a uniform model with English as the dominant lingua franca.
- In order to create alternatives to this monolingual model, universities foster research into the different models of multilingualism that can act as a more efficient cornerstone for their syllabuses and online language learning.
- Universities make business and entrepreneurs understand that these multicultural learning models will help them attract more creative talent and, in particular, provide them with a greater ability to understand their respective national markets.
With regard to the need to develop the technologies required to be able to work in online multilingual work environments, underlined by these final recommendations, Miquel Strubell added that “it is a field in which the UOC could lead the research, given the knowledge that it has gained over 15 years of teaching with these types of ICT tools. The experience acquired in bilingual virtual classrooms should be extended to new language combinations and trilingual classrooms with the tools that we have been developing for computer-assisted translation.”
The conclusions to the EUNoM Project also highlighted the need to “bring together leading specialists” in order to refocus language learning and teaching in light of social and global changes and “to undertake in-depth research into the role of language in creativity and associated skills”.
With this in mind, the UOC Chair in Multilingualism plans to design an ambitious research project funded by the EU under the title ‘The multilingual challenge for the European citizen’, which will carry out a cross-disciplinary study of all the implications on all levels arising from this new sociocultural context and how best to respond to these implications.
25th October 2012
Related links:
Universitat Oberta de Catalunya: http://www.uoc.edu
Linguamón-UOC Chair in Multilingualism: http://www.uoc.edu/portal/en/catedra_multilinguisme/index.html
EUNoM - European Universities Network on Multilingualism: http://www.uoc.edu/portal/en/catedra_multilinguisme/recerca/projectes/eunom/index.html
Duolingo
Duolingo is a free language-learning website and crowdsourced text translation platform. The service is designed so that as users progress through the lessons they simultaneously help to translate websites and other documents. Currently, the site offers only Spanish and German courses for English speakers, though it has plans to expand to French, Italian and Chinese in the future. Duolingo launched in private beta on November 30, 2011, and has accumulated a waiting list of more than 100,000 users. As of December 22, 2011, the service has translated over 24,000 sentences.
European CLIL Resource Centre for Web2.0 Education: Early-to-Long life
E-CLIL is European Union funded project to develop and build resources and a resource centre for the use of Content Language Integrated Learning (CLIL).
It focuses on language learning, learning strategies, multilingualism and multiculturalism. The project is being completed over 3 years and includes partners with a wide-experience of how to create CLIL content and the issues around CLIL.
There is an urgent need for specific materials, resources and guidelines for implementation which guarantee excellence in language learning. The mission of E-CLIL is to improve the quality of language teaching through the use of CLIL to drive the need for Europeans to speak their mother tongue plus two foreign languages.
The project process
The CLIL Centre has a three objectives:
- It will provide support to current and future CLIL education programmes all over Europe
- It will disseminate high quality and already proven materials and resources for content and language learning
- It will enrich teachers’ and children’s knowledge of other European cultures.
The project will build interactive activities, tasks and games, within a storyline, for the use of CLIL teachers. These will be translated in to the project languages.
The project will also build links and include resources to other evaluated CLIL resources across Europe.
There will be opportunities for educators around Europe to engage with the project through social network groups, by providing CLIL resources for evaluation and by using the resources produced by the project.
Internet Translators for all European Languages
Our mission is to highlight quality and to increase confidence in machine translation.
Challenge
Multilingualism is deeply embedded in the concept of the European Union. The rapid and spectacular advances in ICT technologies (in particular mobile communication and the internet) have made an unprecedented amount of content available online, which is increasingly multilingual. This has raised the need to address the problem of removing language barriers in order to make multilingual web content widely accessible. A key technology that plays a vital part in this objective is machine translation (MT).
Developing quality machine translation software is a huge scientific and financial effort, mainly due to the quantity of linguistic resources required; therefore most MT companies focus on only a few languages which are relevant for their targeted markets. As a result, there is currently no easily accessible full-coverage MT solution for all EU languages. Recently Google has published its own machine translation service that provides translation from any European language to any other - all in one place and free of charge, which gives them a huge competitive edge. However, the overall quality of their translation is often inferior to that of other MT solutions for many European languages.
Goal
This project intends to provide a viable alternative as it doesn't offer only full coverage of EU languages, but also provides for each language pair the best quality available at the time and mediates easy transfer to professional translators. The project is carried out by a consortium of European MT companies that have developed the best translation system for at least one language pair. Invitation to the consortium was based upon preliminary tests. All of the companies with the best test scores were invited and all of them decided to pool their expertise and resources to set up a common web service that will provide quality machine translation services for most EU language pairs. Quality will be assured by continuous supervision and evaluation resulting in competition between different providers on the site.
Innovation
A common API makes clear for all participants the present technical requirements of such services. Positive impacts of the standard interfaces are expected, which are relying on existing standards like Unicode, XML, HTLM, HTTP and AJAX.
The evaluation and comparison of the services leads also to innovation. Providers have a better view of the differences of the systems. The recognition of weaknesses usually leads to immediate innovations. Availability of more than one translator for the same language pair opens a new field for improvements. Evaluation and ranking systems were implemented in the project.
The result
The project developed the first European website that provides free online translation from any European language to any other. Moreover, through the competitive approaches, users are ensured to use the best quality translator available.
Impact
Providing such a system to internet users for free is an important step towards accomplishing the "progressive abolition of language barriers in accessing multilingual content on the Web". In addition, the consortium hopes that other service providers will also recognize the advantages of this partnership and join the project. Furthermore, an additional impact on professional translators is expected, as more and more translation memory software integrates machine translation, and if this service becomes integrated into translation memories it will make an impact on the efficiency with which professional translators can work and initiate the long awaited change in the industrial utilization of machine translation.
Il progetto Learning Resource Exchange per la condivisione di risorse tra scuole in Europa
In materia di contenuti pedagogici, l’articolo descrive l’uso delle licenze di contenuti liberi e le difficoltà della loro implementazione, l’indicizzazione dei contenuti da parte di sperimentati professionisti e di utenti occasionali, la traduzione automatica e la generazione automatica di metadati e i vantaggi pedagogici derivanti dalle risorse fornite.
Implementando e utilizzando un portale per lo scambio di risorse di apprendimento (LRE), gli insegnanti europei si sono dotati di uno strumento efficace per la ricerca, la navigazione e l’individuazione di risorse di apprendimento utili per i corsi e hanno potuto apprezzare la possibilità di accedere a contenuti di diversi Paesi e all’origine in diverse lingue. Il concetto di un portale internazionale è stato inoltre considerato come una formidabile opportunità di scambio culturale e un modo per ampliare gli orizzonti ispirandosi a nuove idee per l’insegnamento sorte in altri Paesi.