The LT-LiDER Project Wants to Equip Language Experts to Remain Relevant

The multinational LT-LiDER project (Language and Translation: Literacy in Digital Environments and Resources) turned a year old in December 2024. The project, which combines the efforts of leading European universities from five countries, teamed up with a general goal to prepare language and translation faculty and students for the AI age.

LT-LiDER is funded in part by the European Commission (EC) and sponsored by the Spanish Service for Education Internationalization (SEPIE). The project seeks to determine the technological skills needed by language professionals for employability and provide instructors with the resources to teach those skills effectively. 

From the start, LT-LiDER has sought to raise awareness among practitioners and instructors about the essential role of technology in the language industry. The project builds on the goals and accomplishments of the MultiTraiNMT project, which aimed to demystify neural machine translation (MT), make it accessible to everyone, and establish best practices for its use, the organization directives told Slator.

The LT-LiDER project has some members of the MultiTraiNMT project as well as new ones, including experts from the Technology Working Group of the EC’s European Master’s in Translation network. Led by the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), participating institutions expect to produce resources such as an open-access eBook and instructional videos meant to introduce audiences to essential tools and demonstrate actual use cases.

During its first year of operations, LT-LiDER held a teacher training meeting at TH Köln in Cologne, Germany, where participants began contributing to the eBook. This event was part of a language industry awareness and dialogue program that includes interviews with prominent figures from academia and industry, as well as translation students.

The program is a way to collect information about the latest trends and technologies, and a result of these efforts is a map of language and translation technologies that LT-LiDER expects to publish soon.

In that context, the LT-LiDER team will prioritize feedback from diverse groups — students, trainers, professionals, and decision-makers — through dissemination events, collaborative opportunities, and training sessions. Continuous testing and refinement are also part of the evaluation and refinement approach.

Other project milestones include a self-assessment of digital literacy skills and a platform for machine translation (MT) literacy acquisition, both scheduled for 2025. The eBook, and what the project dubs “training capsules” (i.e., teaching resources for instructors linked to the eBook and the self-assessment questionnaire) are scheduled for completion in 2026.

Pilar Sánchez-Gijón, the principal investigator of the project and a professor at UAB explained in an interview for the University of the Basque Country’s newsletter (Campusa) that, unlike CAT tools that complemented traditional processes, technologies based on AI and natural language processing (NLP) are reconfiguring working methods.

Sánchez-Gijón also added to Slator that “in a rapidly evolving tech landscape, our mission is to equip language experts with the tools to remain relevant and future-ready.”