Multilingual Educational Repositories: Breaking Down the Language Barrier

Abstract

This paper presents a framework for introducing multilingualism into web portals, aiming to facilitate bringing down the language barriers, bridging the language divide between information seekers and the wealth of resources from around the world that are made available through such portals. The main research question addressed is the definition of the problem itself and the description of design affordances that shall allow web portals to meet different linguistic profiles, needs and expectations from users around the globe. The paper describes the methodology used for the analysis of user requirements of the international user base of a thematic web portal aiming to promote discovery of educational resources and concludes with some initial results, discussion of the findings and suggestions for future work.