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Automotive industry benefits from worldwide multilingual learning infrastructure |
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The Language Technology Centre (LTC) recently announced the successful completion of the EU research project EUCAM. LTC presented the results of the project to the public in January at a joint event with its European partners held at the Daimler plant in Mannheim, Germany. The select group of invited guests included the German Research Minister Annette Schavan.
 Dr. Rinsche presents LTC’s technology
EUCAM stands for "Multilingual Communication in European Car Manufacturing". The outcome of the project is a computer-controlled learning system for production workers in the automotive industry, which has already proved its worth in day-to-day use at the international locations of the car makers Mercedes-Benz and Audi, bringing substantial improvements in productivity. LTC developed the multilingual component, which enables employees in various international locations to use the new learning infrastructure efficiently, and to exchange information on learning content and suggested improvements in production between locations in their own language in real time.
The core of EUCAM is the Production Learning System, PLS. To allow staff even outside a language area to benefit from PLS, it has a multilingual structure based on the advanced technology contributed by LTC. This means that when changes are made in one language, users can retrieve information immediately in various other languages, thanks to the use of a combination of different automated translation tools. "In this way, we can enable significantly better inter-cultural knowledge transfer between the production locations around the world", says Dr. Adriane Rinsche, Managing Director of LTC, which has offices in London and Washington DC. A click of the mouse is all it takes to display the diagrams on the screen in English, Portuguese or Japanese – in real time, without the need of any human translation. "So the worker in Japan benefits from the database in exactly the same way as his colleague in Detroit or Mannheim at the minute a change is made in only one of the locations and in only one language", says Dr. Rinsche, whose company has developed the multilingual component of the system over the last couple of years.
PLS means that production workers can view the individual work steps in assembly, manufacture and maintenance on computer terminals whenever they wish. They are guided through the program with a simple, structured intuitive user interface. This allows the people concerned to learn new work steps independently and flexibly at their own workstation, so in the future, standardized training will be possible even without theoretical instruction in the classroom. PLS also provides a facility to submit suggested improvements or to store the knowledge of individual employees so that it can be accessed by any colleague at any time.
The consortium that will be marketing EUCAM to other automotive manufacturers in the future includes the car-maker Daimler, Dekra, IG Metall, Infoman GmbH and LTC. The project was officially launched on May 1st 2005 with a budget of EUR 4.3 million.
LTC, based in London, England and Washington DC, specializes in the development of workflow and business systems for global companies with multilingual needs.
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