Breaking language barriers: translation of training materials on food safety regulations now available

A new plug-in for the Moodle eLearning platform now allows for the training material of the Better Training for Safer Food (BTSF) initiative to be available in all 24 EU languages. 

Funded and managed by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Health and Food Safety (DG SANTE) with the support of HaDEA, the BTSF ACADEMY is the European Commission’s single learning and information portal on BTSF training activities, providing around 150 courses to competent authority staff and stakeholders in EU and non-EU countries.  

Thanks to the new translation plug-in, thousands of officials and professionals working in food and feed areas can navigate training materials on complex food safety regulations in their own language.

The plug-in for the Moodle eLearning platform, is available as open source on code.europa.eu, enables the content of the platform, not just the core interface, to be translated. The plug-in uses eTranslation, the European Commission's neural machine translation service, but can be adapted to hook into other translation engines.

More information is available in the Interoperable Europe portal.

Background

Better Training for Safer Food (BTSF) is a European Commission training initiative to improve the knowledge and implementation of EU rules covering food safety, plant, animal, and One Health.

The basic training principles involve the delivery of information, knowledge sharing and networking, and using the train-the-trainer approach to disseminate the knowledge attained. Training delivery may be through face-to-face courses, virtual classrooms or eLearning.