How do we work in a virtual multilingual classroom? A multilingual environment with Moodle and Apertium

Abstract

Multilingualism is a reality in the XXIst Century and New Technologies reveal as a new powerful way to cope with its main issues and the challenges its treatment implies. In this sense a great amount of work has been carried out for the last twenty years in the field of Language Engineering and Applied Linguistics. A big effort has been made to develop new paradigms to tackle with the issue of multilingualism in modern societies, in particular in the context of multicultural university teaching. The Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), within the framework of the Linguamón-UOC Chair in Multilingualism, has developed a virtual learning environment with an integrated machine translation system. Thanks to this project, which works with free software applications Moodle and Apertium, a multilingual learning environment can be provided both to teachers and students in Catalan, English, French and Spanish at the same time. Such an environment is to be released under a free software licence (GNU) in the shape of a CMS platform (Moodle) and an embedded machine translation system (Apertium). This system includes a language detector and a pre-editing module that corrects incoming messages, without requiring any intervention from the user. This helps improve the quality of the resulting translations. The whole system has been adapted to the type of text seen in email messages following the prior study of the messages seen in the UOC’s virtual forums. This environment has been submitted to a survey among students. After testing our product we have reached the following conclusion: the degree of satisfaction of this tool ultimately depends on the characteristics of the users. Whereas the users who are used to communicate in more than one language appreciate the multilingual potential, the ones who speak one only language do not appraise but the use of their own language. Nevertheless the general point of view indicates that the majority of the users is for a multilingual environment.