Interactive tool-based production of multilingual teaching and learning materials

During an educational project, where partners from 12 universities of eight countries jointly developed teaching and learning materials, it became necessary to produce language variants of these materials. This process is supported by a newly developed tool. The tool introduces a disciplined and economical strategy to develop multilingual teaching and learning objects and to reduce translation efforts. It keeps translations consistent with the help of an internal dictionary dynamically maintained during tool usage. Furthermore, the tool provides for a common layout of all language variants and in that way enhances maintainability of the material. The tool is applied interactively by a technical translator to avoid quality loss resulting from automatic translation.