Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the Vice President, Prime Minister and Ruler of Dubai, together with Crown Prince and Dubai Executive Council Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum visited the Translation Challenge site to review its progress, which falls under the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Arabic e-Learning Project.
The project is aimed at providing over 50 million Arab students around the world access to 5,000 educational videos for free.
The translation “factory” is a simulation of the challenge’s mechanisms and processes, including how the team goes about translating content and preparing it for video production in Arabic, before producing all the videos. The Translation Challenge is the most comprehensive challenge dedicated to Arabising educational content in math and sciences.
Over 300 dedicated volunteers, 1,500 videos and 3 million words have already been translated. Sheikh Mohammed personally oversaw the launch of the content approval phase, in line with the current curriculum, as well as the formation of the study groups who will ensure the quality of the videos before their official launch in October. While touring the translation “factory”, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid and Sheikh Hamdan also participated in the challenge by lending their voices to an educational video.
“We are fuelled by the energy and enthusiasm shared amongst the Translation Challenge volunteers. We have one team of thousands of volunteers to start a new phase in the education of the Arab World. Our students need to have access to advanced educational content, and the Mohammed bin Rashid e-Learning Project will be the largest platform to provide it,” Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid said.
He added that mathematics and sciences in Arab schools are key to resuming Arab civilisation, and that translation is the foundation of an Arab renaissance, and opens the doors to invaluable knowledge.
“We need to provide support to math and sciences material in our schools, and to encourage and support our students in these fields, so that we can shape a generation of Arab scientists, researchers and thinkers. This is the fastest way to bridging the education gap in the Arab world,” Sheikh Mohammed noted.
It also included students from UAE schools in different grades, who learned about the process of Arabisation from their teachers before they watched and evaluated the final videos.
The translation “factory” included several workstations, similar to organised production lines, in which volunteers worked within a clear framework. The work was divided into stages and distributed to different platforms. The process started with selecting educational videos from the latest international curricula, for various grades, before their content was deduced into text.
The text is then translated to Arabic, reviewed, and audited for information and language under the supervision of teachers, editors and specialised professionals.
It will then be matched with the approved educational curricula, and integrated into the Arabic curriculum through audio commentary, after being produced with visuals and graphics to enhance its quality. Finally, it was presented to a group of students from grade 7 to 12. They assessed the content, design, accuracy and clarity of the material on the video.
The Translation Challenge is a call to action for all Arabs to come together to translate to Arabic 5,000 videos and over 11 million words of educational content in science and math for students from kindergarten to grade 12. The project will offer the material online free to over 50 million Arab students in the hopes of rebooting civilisation in the region, and instilling a curiosity for knowledge in future generations to come.
