transLectures is a European project to provide improved technologies for the automatic transcription and translation of online educational videos. Funded under the EU's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) for research and technological development, the project was launched on 1 November 2011 and will run for three years until 31 October 2014.

Project overview

Online collections of educational video material are fast becoming a staple feature of the Internet. What we are working on at transLectures is a set of easy-to-use tools that will allow users to add multilingual subtitles to these videos and, by doing so, make their content available to a much wider audience.

Specifically, automatic transcription tools will provide verbatim subtitles, thereby allowing the hard-of-hearing and, for example, non-native speakers, access to their content. Meanwhile, machine translation tools will make these subtitles available in languages other than that in which the video was recorded.

Furthermore, a key line of research at transLectures is that of intelligent interaction. This is where users are called upon to post-edit not all, but selected segments of automatic output as part of an interactive process designed to improve not only the current subtitles but all future subtitles generated using the transLectures tool.

The languages and language pairs being targeted are: English, Spanish and Slovenian for transcription; and English<>Spanish, English<>Slovenian, English>German and English>French for translation.