MeLLANGE aims to adapt vocational training of translators and other language professionals to the new needs arising from the ongoing globalisation process.

The impact of globalisation has been to augment cross-cultural communication, hence the need for the management of intercultural language resource, to which language professionals have not yet adapted. Therefore, new skills and competences are increasingly required from language professionals in the labour market, especially in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), and language resource management. Many studies have shown that both continuing and initial education for language professionals will have to focus on innovative, dynamic and collaborative learning environments for constantly acquiring new, market-oriented competences in content management, localization and globalization. Accordingly, MeLLANGE targets two groups:

• Students in initial vocational training intending to become language professionals;
• Active language professionals such as translators, technical writers, localisers, language resource managers, and trainers, intending to update and expand their competences in order to enable them to compete in emerging and changing markets in Europe.

MeLLANGE enables these groups to take advantage of Europe's rich cultural and linguistic diversity, to benefit from corpus-based 'real-life' teaching material, and to personalise their training by accessing specialised modules. ICT data and teaching materials will combat the lack of resources in this field, and bridge the gap between education and the labour market. Language professionals will take advantage of the modularity of the provision to select the specific modules they need.

The first aim of MeLLANGE consists in devising a methodology for the collaborative creation of corpus-based eLearning teaching contents in translation, language resource management and technology. Its second aim is to address the issue of a vocational training policy at the European level by coordinating Masters of Arts (MA) programmes, within the framework of the Bologna declaration. MeLLANGE will design a European Masters of Arts that will be recognised by the different partners, thus enabling student and professional mobility within the European Community.

To achieve these objectives, the project will address the following aims and yield the corresponding results:

1. Reuse and adaptation of existing data for the teaching of intercultural language resource management, such as multilingual parallel corpora, and learner translators’ corpora. This will lead to the creation of corpus-based raw teaching material (“error typology” see the results section) for translation trainers and for the on-line courses.
2. Creation of on-line interactive and collaborative teaching contents (courses)– a novel approach in translation and language resource management training. All academic partners in MeLLANGE have already started this adaptation process, and already have on-line material. With a view to the project, some partners have put on-line new courses during the academic year 2002-03. However, as the new skills and competences cover a wide range of possibilities, it is difficult for one university to offer everything. The same applies to companies involved in globalisation and eLearning. Hence the necessity for universities and professional partners to join forces to respond to market needs in both initial and continuing professional education.
3. Innovative use of existing eLearning technologies and tools to put raw teaching material and courses on-line. In this respect, the project will use the commercial platform of one of the industrial partners, working on new specifications customised to multicultural content management.