22 mai 2013

Taghreedat, the largest Arabic crowd-sourcing initiative in the Middle East and North Africa, has announced a partnership with Coursera, the world’s leading Massive Open Online Course provider, to translate major international university courses across multiple disciplines for Arab students worldwide, for free.
Leading global universities, including Stanford, Yale, Columbia, Georgia, Duke, Northwestern, Pennsylvania, Princeton and Edinburgh, are offering a number of their courses for free on Coursera in English. With this partnership, some of the world’s top university courses will be accessible for free for all Arabic-speaking users.
Starting May 19, Taghreedat’s 9,000 translators, writers and editors in 37 countries worldwide will have a chance to translate two university courses, marking the official start of the collaboration with Coursera. Stanford University’s Math Think and Duke University’s Behavioral Economics will be the first two courses to be localized, with plans for more courses to follow.
A group of Taghreedat translation language moderators will be managing project quality in the following weeks to ensure the courses are localized accurately and are accent-free.
“This is a major milestone for Taghreedat, especially that we are looking at diversifying our localization project portfolio and focusing on Open Educational Resources as a strategic area that we are engaging our crowd-sourcing community in,” said Taghreedat co-founders Mina Takla and Sami Mubarak.
“2013 has been a very exciting year for Taghreedat, including collaborations with WhatsApp, Gameloft, the Wikimedia Foundation and Easy Chirp, in which over 8,000 Arabic translators have participated so far. Localization of apps and games are two new and very unique additions to the initiative’s contributions to Arabic digital content, and we have more ambitious plans for the rest of the year.”
The Taghreedat - Coursera collaboration is part of a larger global partnership that Coursera is announcing this week with more than 15 translation organizations worldwide to translate its courses into the most popular language markets reflected by Coursera students: Russian, Portuguese, Turkish, Japanese, Ukrainian, Kazakh and Arabic. The majority of translated courses are expected to be available by Sept. 2013.
“The institutions that are providing translation services for our free online courses are helping to make the educational content on Coursera more accessible to the millions of people around the world who stand to benefit from these resources but are not fluent in English. The potential to impact global education is greatly elevated by our ability to bridge language barriers,” said Coursera co-founder Daphne Koller.
“Many of our students are already taking advantage of user-generated subtitles in our courses, and we believe that having translations will significantly improve the learning experience for non-native English speakers,” said Coursera co-CEO Andrew Ng. “By offering courses in more languages, we hope to provide quality educational opportunities to more of the students who need it most.”
Over the past few months, Coursera has welcomed 29 new universities to its platform, in addition to six educational institutions and museums, bringing the total number of participating institutions to 69. The new additions include 16 international schools that offer courses in Chinese, French, Italian and Spanish.

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