Translating OER into other languages using crowdsourcing and computer translations

[Kathleen Ludewig Omollo]

Hi global dScribes, 

We've got an Open.Michigan project that I want to share with you all that's a great example of the peer-to-peer creation of Open Educational Resources that we discuss on this list. 

This week University of Michigan launched a campaign to attract volunteers to translate the English captions for 31 Creative-Commons licensed health education videos (specifically disaster management and microbiology) from Michigan, Ghana, and East Africa: http://openmi.ch/invite-translate-healthOER. Our motivation for the campaign to make the materials more accessible around the world. Our priority languages are French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swahili, but we encourage all languages. We have computer-generated translations in those 4 languages for people to review and correct, plus 31 others. 

For those of you in this group who are multilingual, please, volunteer some of your time and flex your language skills. Your contribution will certainly have a significant impact on increasing the portability and visibility of these learning materials around the world. 

We'll keep you posted on the outcomes. 

-Kathleen