Customized Crowd-sourcing Platform to Localize Coursera

Online, April 2, 2014 (Newswire.com) - ABBYY Language Services and Digital October Center are proud to announce the launch of the joint crowdsourcing project Let's Translate Coursera. The project will involve volunteer translation of the best Coursera courses into Russian.

Coursera is a well-known online education platform founded in 2012 by professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller from Stanford University. It offers online courses from the best universities worldwide for anyone to take, for free. The courses cover a wide variety of fields of knowledge, from the natural sciences to the humanities. Today, lecturers from more than 100 universities participate in the program and almost seven million people from all over the world are attending the courses.

The project homepage at Coursera.ABBYY-LS.com is the meeting point for thousands of volunteers from across Russia and beyond: to get started, volunteers can simply register, select a course, and start translating. All participants will have their own profiles and be able to discuss translations with the other volunteers as they work, vote for the best translations, and receive awards for their achievements. Millions of Coursera users will see the best translations.

Coursera.ABBYY-LS.com is based on a platform developed by ABBYY Language Services, a leader in linguistic technology and services. Volunteers will enjoy a faster, more convenient translation process that simultaneously promotes quality, thanks to the professional tools provided for translation of the Coursera lectures. The platform combines the benefits of the SmartCAT translation automation system and Lingvo.Pro terminology management solution. Moreover, the sophisticated technology is hidden "under the hood" of the intuitive interface, which allows translators to get started without any previous training.

"Project participants will enrich the educational opportunities for Russian-speaking Internet users by making the best courses worldwide available in their native language. Volunteers, too, will be able to get a greater grasp on course topics, since you always understand things better when you translate them. By contributing, volunteers will also be able to improve their translation skills and try out the most advanced translation automation technology. I am confident that the project will be of benefit to many people in our country, and we are happy that our technology can help to make a difference," said Ivan Smolnikov, CEO of ABBYY Language Services.

"If you want to influence the Russian educational system, you need a firm foothold — the best education platform, strong local partners, and, above all, a team of bright thinkers. We are happy to have found these qualities in Coursera and ABBYY Language Services. For us, the launch of Let's Translate Coursera opens up huge potential for synergy between our initiatives. Localized courses will take our joint (together with Coursera) Learning Hubs project to new heights and streamline the corporate education program. In our opinion, the Let's Translate Coursera platform has every chance to become a driver for the national educational ecosystem," says Yulia Lesnikova, Director of Educational Programs at Digital October Center.

"Education accessibility is at the heart of what we do at Coursera, and we are excited to partner with ABBYY Language Services and Digital October to translate and expand the reach of our course content among Russian-speaking students in Russia and around the world," said Andrew Ng, co-founder of Coursera. "With the help of ABBYY Language Services' crowdsourced translations and our ongoing work with Digital October, we can further scale quality education, while also granting our very own students the chance to learn and give back to their community."

Learn more about Let's Translate Coursera and register at the project's website — Coursera.ABBYY-LS.com.

M.Video is the general sponsor of the online project. Official partners of the Let's Translate Coursera are Intel and Microsoft. Communications partner is VimpelCom. ESET and Future Today are the media sponsors.