Bilingual multimedia: some challenges for teachers

The present paper examines issues which emerged during the course of a project developing software for the production of bilingual multimedia stories in European languages of lesser diffusion. The language pairs in question are Basque and French, Catalan and Spanish, Dutch and Frisian, Irish and English and Welsh and English. Arguments are presented for the greater flexibility of bilingual multimedia over ‘paper’books in terms of visual display, choice of language and the use of sound. There is also discussion of the complex issue of how best to use both languages to support second language learning and whether ‘parallel authoring’ presents a more useful approach than translation