Artificial intelligence and new language technologies are presenting schools with great challenges. Through its IUED@school programme, the ZHAW School of Applied Linguistics is facing concerns head-on.

Day in day out, digital natives embrace Google Translate, DeepL, ChatGPT and co. at school, often without critically questioning their use of these tools. And what about their teachers? With its IUED@school programme, the Institute of Translation and Interpreting (IUED) at the ZHAW School of Applied Linguistics is introducing teachers and students at baccalaureate and upper secondary vocational schools to the language technologies of the future and answering burning questions.

Empowering students

Since the free programme started in February 2023, the IUED has held workshops for some 600 students and around 75 teachers. The IUED thus not only helps students and teachers enhance their language technology literacy but also empowers them to use AI and language technologies in a future-oriented way. For their workshops, the experts from IUED@school visit schools for one or more lessons or invite the schools to attend the workshops at the ZHAW. The 40-minute workshops delve into subjects such as cross-cultural communication and film subtitles.

Why still learn foreign languages?

In the workshop on neural machine translation, students find out why it still makes sense to learn a foreign language despite DeepL’s ability to translate in a matter of seconds. They discover the benefits of these machine translation tools, but also discuss the risks they pose and how to best use them.