Language Barrier. Although some students and researchers are eager to benefit from mobility programmes, they might be discouraged to do so due to language barriers. Living in a country where one does not speak the language can be enough to dissuade anyone. Adding to that the fact that students might have to take courses taught in the language of the host country, it is not hard to understand why some researchers and students simply choose not to enter mobility programmes. Learning a second language is mandatory in most EU member states, with a clear majority of pupils choosing to learn English. The predominant language spoken after the native language in the south Mediterranean countries however, is usually French, followed by English. Although these facts demonstrate that a language barrier does indeed exist, this barrier does not have to be insurmountable. Countries sharing the same mother tongue or second language should endeavour to establish or, if already established, widen the scope of mobility programmes with each other. In addition, intensive summer language courses teaching the native language would help prospective students learn the basics to help them effectively navigate their lives in their host country. Universities getting involved and assigning volunteer ‘tandem language buddies’ to each incoming student would not only help the student learn the language faster but would also help him/her get integrated faster.
Language Barrier. ➢ Firstly, one common problem diagnosed, is the limited availability of tools and libraries that process multilingual content. Specifically, the sources that were provided from most of the pilot countries were exclusively in their native language. Most of the tools, dictionaries, libraries and frameworks for language manipulation and processing (NLP in general) that reside as open source are limited to English language. Moreover, due to the use of semantically annotated words, the translation and context of a word needs to connect with its context in other languages. When for example the word ‘food’ is used as a search, then there needs to be a connection with the Spanish word ‘comida’ to facilitate retrieval of Spanish results that may interest the user. However, this type of semantic 1 xxxxx://xxx.xxxxxxxxxxxx.xxx/statistics/twitter/profiles/detail/374964231-hrbireland annotation between languages is extremely difficult especially for developers who do not understand both languages.
