Making On-line Science Course Materials Easily Translatable and Accessible Worldwide: Challenges and Solutions

The PhET Interactive Simulations Project partnered with the Excellence Research Center of Science and Mathematics Education at King Saud University with the joint goal of making simulations useable worldwide. One of the main challenges of this partnership is to make PhET simulations and the website...

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Published inJournal of science education and technology Vol. 21; no. 1; pp. 1 - 10
Main Authors Adams, Wendy K., Alhadlaq, Hisham, Malley, Christopher V., Perkins, Katherine K., Olson, Jonathan, Alshaya, Fahad, Alabdulkareem, Saleh, Wieman, Carl E.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Dordrecht Springer Science+Business Media 01.02.2012
Springer Netherlands
Springer
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects
Character encoding
Computer Mediated Communication
Computer simulation
Computer Software
Conferences (Gatherings)
Education
Educational materials
Educational Technology
Exanthema
Expertise
Foreign Countries
Interaction
Java
Language
Language translation
Languages
Materials science
Mathematics Education
Personal computers
Saudi Arabia
Science Curriculum
Science Education
Simulation
Software
Teachers
Translations
Typographic fonts
Universities
Websites
Saudi Arabia
Simulations
Science education
Translation
Websites
Languages
Research
Online resources
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Summary:The PhET Interactive Simulations Project partnered with the Excellence Research Center of Science and Mathematics Education at King Saud University with the joint goal of making simulations useable worldwide. One of the main challenges of this partnership is to make PhET simulations and the website easily translatable into any language. The PhET project team overcame this challenge by creating the Translation Utility. This tool allows a person fluent in both English and another language to easily translate any of the PhET simulations and requires minimal computer expertise. In this paper we discuss the technical issues involved in this software solution, as well as the issues involved in obtaining accurate translations. We share our solutions to many of the unexpected problems we encountered that would apply generally to making on-line scientific course materials available in many different languages, including working with: languages written right-to-left, different character sets, and different conventions for expressing equations, variables, units and scientific notation.
ISSN:1059-0145
1573-1839
DOI:10.1007/s10956-010-9275-y