Multilingual courses and translations management.

Multilingual courses and translations management.

by Mihai Bojonca -
Number of replies: 15

Hello everyone,

I have some ideas and I am curious about your thoughts and experience.

1. How do you effectively manage courses in multiple languages and deliver them synchronously?

2.What strategies do you use to keep translations accurate, synchronized, and reusable across different courses and sessions?

Looking forward to learning from all of you!

Best regards, Mihai.

In reply to Mihai Bojonca

Re: Multilingual courses and translations management.

by Katarzyna Potocka -
Interesting topic - not sure if is an issue at our University in Vienna, but Gergely and Maria might know more about that.
In reply to Mihai Bojonca

Re: Multilingual courses and translations management.

by Carolyn Morokutti -
Hallo Mihai,

I had a meeting with my Dean yesterday and he wants to explore this option. I saw a couple of old posts from 2022 but nothing recent. Would be really interested to collaborate.

Best, Carolyn
In reply to Carolyn Morokutti

Re: Multilingual courses and translations management.

by Mihai Bojonca -

Thank you for the replies. 

I know Luca is very much involved in maintaining the mlang plugin however there is very limited shared knowledge on the topic in the moodle community or generally on the web.

Anything is welcome hoping to get it moving.

In reply to Mihai Bojonca

Re: Multilingual courses and translations management.

by Carolyn Morokutti -
I agree, I did a huge search before I came here to post something. Would be great to know if anyone is working on such a project, interested in collaborating on one or has an idea how it could work. I already have the plugin and I work with a dual interface but this is going many steps further to offer dual language learning material. Would be great if there was a custom made AI for this smile
In reply to Carolyn Morokutti

Re: Multilingual courses and translations management.

by Tim Hunt -
2 things to be aware of:

* https://moodle.org/plugins/filter_multilang2 - arguably a better approach than the one build into Moodle.

* https://moodle.org/plugins/filter_translations / https://docs.moodle.org/404/en/Content_translation_plugin_set - what Moodle HQ use for Moodle Academy.
In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Multilingual courses and translations management.

by Ralf Hilgenstock -
I can agree to Tims post. We worked with filter_translations and connected with google translation. There is a commit for Deepl also we will test it in the next weeks.

Our experience:
- Google translate works but is not the best quality. We expect Deepl will work better.
- The filter translates all course content in the database for all languages that are installed with lang packs. Its not possible to select courses for translation.
- The filter translates also forum posts.
- Files, H5P, Scorms or subtitles are not translated.

Faults we saw
- In some cases the names of activities were translated.
- Names of its own are translated. This is a general problem of auto translation.

What we wish:
- settings for exclusion of activity types from translation
- setting for disabling translation for a course/course category

See you in Vienna
In reply to Mihai Bojonca

Re: Multilingual courses and translations management.

by Luca Bösch -
Dear all,
I am very interested and willing to share lots of knowledge. Note that Stephan Robotta who developed tiny_multilang2 will be there, in Vienna, too.
Another colleague of us, Bruno Baudry, has developed https://github.com/brunobaudry/moodle-local_deepler which with the aid of the Deepl API helps to translate entire Moodle courses. I will happily demo that (on a productive Moodle instance, but the capabilities are not given to editingteacher yet) as part of a session.
Best,
Luca
In reply to Luca Bösch

Re: Multilingual courses and translations management.

by Mihai Bojonca -
This is very welcome and provides a valuable opportunity for real-world benchmarking. I appreciate your willingness to share your expertise and tools and for your interest in the topic.
In reply to Mihai Bojonca

Re: Multilingual courses and translations management.

by Maria Dorfer-Frick -
Hi Mihai,
This really is a very interesting topic that has concerned me for many years in various contexts. I haven't found a really good solution yet and would be happy to discuss it/ share knowledge!
See you in Vienna
Maria
In reply to Mihai Bojonca

Re: Multilingual courses and translations management.

by Sarah Edelsbrunner -
Interesting topic, I'd be happy to chat about it at moodlemoot! We are currently also working on new ways to manage courses with a lot of languages, as the mlang-plugin and filters are getting to their limits of usability (and also of character limits!) when you have courses with 10+ languages.
In reply to Sarah Edelsbrunner

Re: Multilingual courses and translations management.

by Luca Bösch -
Thanks, Sarah, for your contribution.

The character limit issue, view as well the recently raised https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-82581 just strikes me as a thing we should not blindly surrender to.
Why not prepare a carefully prepared pull request to Moodle main, in the DevCamp to move all such fields away from LENGTH="255" (or what they were) to LENGTH="medium" (ore something more suited) to really allow 10+ languages and very, very long field sizes?
Admittedly not a very techie pull request/bug fix, I'll admit, but usable as hell!
Database space cost just does not matter any more in 2024, does it?

Best,
Luca
In reply to Luca Bösch

Re: Multilingual courses and translations management.

by Tim Hunt -
TEXT problems cane be a problem cross-DB. They can't be indexed, and therefore they cannot be used in joins or queries effciently. So, this needs carful thought in each case.

Note that, the limit for CHAR columns is 1333 chars, so a much safer, and possibly sufficient, option is to change all the 255s that need it to 1333.
In reply to Luca Bösch

Re: Multilingual courses and translations management.

by Hugo Ribeiro -
There's also other requests around this issue: https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-70556
In reply to Mihai Bojonca

Re: Multilingual courses and translations management.

by Mihai Bojonca -
Do these make it immediately to Idea Pitching wall?