Mitigating Language Barriers in Education: Developing Multilingual Digital Learning Materials with Machine Translation

2025-09-11

AI Summary

Czech primary and secondary schools face a critical shortage of mother-tongue educational resources for multilingual learners, particularly Ukrainian-speaking students. Method: This study develops an end-to-end Czech–Ukrainian neural machine translation (NMT) system tailored to educational contexts, optimized for structured documents (XML/PDF) and designed to preserve formatting while ensuring high-fidelity translation of scientific and technical terminology. The system automatically translates 9,000 Czech interactive exercises into Ukrainian, English, and German; integrates them into the national education portal; and powers a free, open-source multilingual learning application. Contribution/Results: This work presents the first dedicated Czech–Ukrainian NMT system for education, incorporating multimodal document parsing, domain-adaptive training, and document-aware translation architecture. Teacher-led empirical evaluation confirms significant improvements in resource accessibility and pedagogical suitability for non-native speakers in classroom settings.

Technology Category

• Natural Language Processing: Machine Translation, Multilinguality, Cross-Lingual NLP
• Machine Learning: Multimodal Learning
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Conversational Systems for Recommendation & Retrieval

Application Category

• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Multilingual and cross-lingual Web search
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Mining multimedia, multimodal, multilingual, cross-lingual Web data
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Applied ML and AI for Web-based mobile applications

Abstract

The EdUKate project combines digital education, linguistics, translation studies, and machine translation to develop multilingual learning materials for Czech primary and secondary schools. Launched through collaboration between a major Czech academic institution and the country's largest educational publisher, the project is aimed at translating up to 9,000 multimodal interactive exercises from Czech into Ukrainian, English, and German for an educational web portal. It emphasizes the development and evaluation of a direct Czech-Ukrainian machine translation system tailored to the educational domain, with special attention to processing formatted content such as XML and PDF and handling technical and scientific terminology. We present findings from an initial survey of Czech teachers regarding the needs of non-Czech-speaking students and describe the system's evaluation and implementation on the web portal. All resulting applications are freely available to students, educators, and researchers.

Problem

• Develop multilingual digital learning materials for schools
• Create Czech-Ukrainian machine translation for education
• Translate multimodal exercises into Ukrainian English German

Innovation

• Developing Czech-Ukrainian machine translation for education
• Processing formatted XML and PDF educational content
• Handling technical terminology in multilingual exercises