Translations and Open Science Project

From September 2022 to September 2023 OPERAS coordinates a series of studies commissioned by the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research in order to explore the possible uses of translation technologies to foster multilingualism in scholarly communication.

OPERAS is glad to run these studies, which is in continuity with its long-term involvement in the field of multilingualism and which allows us to approach this question through the more specific dimension of translation. 

In 2020, the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research launched the Translations and Open Science project with the aim to explore the opportunities offered by translation technologies to foster multilingualism in scholarly communication and thus help to remove language barriers according to Open Science principles.

During the initial phase of the project (2020), a first working group, made up of experts in natural language processing and translation, published a report suggesting recommendations and avenues for experimentation with a view to establishing a scientific translation service combining relevant technologies, resources and human skills.

Once developed, the scientific translation service is intended to:

• address the needs of different users, including researchers (authors and readers), readers outside the academic community, publishers of scientific texts, dissemination platforms or open archives;
• combine specialised language technologies and human skills, in particular adapted machine translation engines and in-domain language resources to support the translation process;
• be founded on the principles of open science, hence based on open-source software as well as shareable resources, and used to produce open access translations.

Project Goals

In order to follow up on recommendations and lay the foundation of the translation service, the OPERAS Research Infrastructure was commissioned by the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research to coordinate a series of preparatory studies in the following areas:

1. Mapping and collection of corpora: identifying and defining the conditions for collecting and preparing corpora of bilingual scientific texts which will serve as training dataset for specialised translation engines, source data for terminology extraction, and translation memory creation.
2. Use cases: drafting an overview of the current translation practices in scholarly communication and defining the use cases of a technology-based scientific translation service (associated features, expected quality, editorial and technical workflows, and involved human experts).
3. Machine translation output evaluation: evaluating the output of a set of translation engines with specialised texts.
4. Roadmap and budget projections: making budget projections to anticipate the costs to develop and run the service.

The four preparatory studies are planned during a one-year period as of September 2022. They will be outsourced to service providers by tender.

Provisional schedule

Call 1: Mapping and collection of scientific bilingual corpora

Bid period: 1^st September to 7 October 2022

Service starting date: 1^st November 2022

Expected turnaround time: 4 months

Link to the call

Call 2: Use case study for a technology-based scientific translation service

Bid period: 1^st September to 28 October 2022

Service starting date: 1^st December 2022

Expected turnaround time: 6 months

Link to the call

Call 3: Machine translation output evaluation

Bid period: 1^st November to 23 December 2022

Service starting date: 1^st March 2023

Expected turnaround time: 4 months

Link to the call to be released

Call 3: Roadmap and budget projections

Bid period: 1^st March to 15 April 2023

Service starting date: 1^st June 2023

Expected turnaround time: 4 months

Link to the call to be released

For further information please contact: Susanna Fiorini, Scientific Coordinator of the Translations and Open Science project (susanna.fiorini[a]operas-eu.org).