Imagine being tasked with mastering complex food safety regulations, but the training materials are in a language you don’t fully understand. For thousands of European professionals, this was the reality—until now.

A new plug-in for the Moodle eLearning platform, using machine translation for on-the-fly translation of training materials to EU languages, is to be made available as open source on code.europa.eu. The plug-in enables the contents of the platform, not just the core interface, to be translated and is a first for the European Commission.

The plug-in uses eTranslation, the European Commission's neural machine translation service, but can be adapted to hook into other translation engines. The plug-in is already used in the "Better Training for Safer Food ACADEMY" (BTSF). This is a training initiative to improve the knowledge and implementation of EU rules covering food safety, plant, animal, and One Health.

The BTSF ACADEMY, which is funded and managed by the European Commission Directorate-General for Health and Food Safety (DG SANTE), offers some 150 courses to the staff of competent authorities in the Member States and elsewhere involved in food safety.

The plug-in, developed by the BTSF ACADEMY team for DG SANTE, was released on the European Day of Languages in 2023.

"Most of the BTSF ACADEMY content is created in English, which can be a barrier for participants," says Mr Gabor Zsolt Nagy, leading the development team of the BTSF ACADEMY. "With our new plug-in, participants are able to access training materials in their own language, making it easier for them to learn, understand and disseminate the content," he says. About one-quarter of the participants used the automatic translation provided by the plug-in in 2024 and this continues to increase.

Seamless integration

The developers working for BTSF ACADEMY took great care in seamlessly integrating the plug-in with Moodle's interface language selection tool. Users can select an alternative language from the Moodle menu and see the training material translated on the fly. "If the content has not already been translated in the selected language, the plug-in will display a 'loading animation'," describes Mr Balint Kelemen, who wrote the plug-in.

A second challenge was to develop a mechanism to exclude abbreviations, medical terms, trademarks and other specialized expressions from translation. "The Commission's eTranslation is designed to handle documents, where such exceptions can be corrected afterwards. For the BTSF ACADEMY, we needed an on-the-fly mechanism to catch exceptions." Combining HTML and CSS, Mr Kelemen been able to seamlessly integrate the "no translation" tag that instructs the translation engine to skip the content. "We did a lot of digging in the specifications of the translation machine, and lots of experiments," he says.

Ready for reuse

The BTSF ACADEMY is currently serving some 6,000 trainees per year. Additionally, the BTSF ACADEMY Library which consists of a collection of learning materials produced during the implementation of the training activities within the BTSF Initiative is available for all the 30,000 BTSF ACADEMY users. This generates more than 1 million page views per year. DG SANTE is currently working to make the material available to a far wider audience.

The BTSF ACADEMY plug-in should be of interest to organizations using Moodle and that have access to the Commission's eTranslation service. "It will not be too hard to adapt the code to use other translation engines," reassures Mr Kelemen.

The team is currently finishing the documentation and getting ready to upload everything to code.europa.eu. "And like Moodle, we will share the software publicly using the GNU General Public License (GPLv3)," says Mr Nagy.

More information:

BTSF plug-in
BTSF ACADEMY
Executive Agency
Directorate-General for Health and Food Safety
eTranslation
Moodle Learning Management System