Calls for translations and Open Science receive submissions until October 7

A series of tenders is being opened by the OPERAS research infrastructure to form the basis of a technology-based science translation service, with the aim of developing multilingualism in scholarly communication and helping to remove language barriers, following the principles of Open Science. The project, "Translations and Open Science", was launched in 2020 by the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research (MESR), and aims to meet the needs of different users by combining specialised language technologies and human skills.

During the initial phase of the project, a first working group published a report suggesting recommendations and means for experimentation. Now, in 2022, OPERAS Infrastructure has been commissioned by MESR to coordinate the series of preparatory studies for the service envisioned for the project. The first two calls are open, since early September, with a submission deadline of October 7.

The first study, "Mapping and collection of scientific bilingual corpora", aims to identify and define the conditions for the collection and preparation of corpora of bilingual scientific texts, which will serve as a set of training data for specialized translation engines, source data for technology extraction, and translation memory creation.

The second study with a call open until October 7th is focused on use cases and seeks to establish an overview of current translation practices in scholarly communication, and to define use cases for technology-based translation services (associated features, expected quality, editorial and technical workflows, and human experts involved).

In the coming months, tenders will be launched for studies (3) and (4), respectively dedicated to the evaluation of the translation results, and the roadmap and budget projections for the translation service.

Once developed, the translation service aims to:

- Respond to the needs of different users, including researchers (authors and readers), readers from outside the academic community, publishers of scientific texts, dissemination platforms or open archives;

- Combine specialized language technologies and human skills, in particular adapted translation engines and in-domain language resources to support the translation process;

- Be founded on the principles of open science, based on open source software as well as shareable resources, and used to produce open access translations.

The four preparatory studies are planned to last for a period of one year from September 2022.

More information is available on the OPERAS website:

1) Mapping and collection of scientific bilingual corpora (call)
2) Use case study for a technology-based scientific translation service (call).

Learn more about the projects and services of the OPERAS infrastructure in this link. The University of Coimbra is a member of the OPERAS Executive Assembly.