ClassRoute: An English to Punjabi Educational Video Translation Pipeline for Supporting Punjabi Mother-Tongue Education

ABSTRACT

Information Communication Technology (ICT) permeates almost every aspect of our daily lives and has become one of the most important priorities for formal and informal education. However, many people particularly those in least developed countries, are unable to reap the benefits due to lack of access to ICT but also due to lack of access to quality educational material. Additionally, in Punjab India, due to a shortage of resources and lack of infrastructure, the education system suffers from massive gaps including high student to teacher ratios, shortage of qualified teachers, and poor teacher training programs. This all has also been further exacerbated due to the COVID19 Pandemic as schools shut down globally and all teaching/learning activities moved online where possible or were canceled otherwise. In an effort to help relieve some of the burden on the Punjabi education system, and motivated by the proven efficiency of mother-tongue based education as well as the importance of visual-based learning, this paper introduces a pipeline for translating English educational videos into Punjabi equivalents which seeks to go beyond simple translation and in future iterations take into consideration the cultural needs of the learners in order to better connect them with the topics being taught. This pipeline is among a series of under construction pipelines aimed at translating English educational videos into other languages, dubbed as ClassRoute.