Tomedes Brings TUMO's Creative Technology Curriculum to Spanish and Basque-Speaking Teens

The Client

Company name: TUMO Center for Creative Technologies
What does the company do? TUMO is a free-of-charge educational program that puts teenagers in charge of their own learning across 14 creative and technical disciplines. Founded in Yerevan, Armenia, TUMO now operates centers across Europe and Latin America (including Paris, Berlin, Lisbon, Buenos Aires, and Los Angeles) serving tens of thousands of students through self-learning activities, workshops, and project labs.  
Deadline: To be confirmed across phased delivery schedule
What do they need? TUMO required translations of its full learning curriculum (approximately 300,000 words of instructional, technical, and educational content) from English into two target languages: Spanish and Basque. The curriculum spans 14 learning targets including animation, game development, music, filmmaking, programming, robotics, graphic design, and photography. Content ranges from technical programming references to creative briefs to step-by-step instructional guides, and would be used by students at TUMO centers in Spanish-speaking and Basque-speaking regions.

The Challenges

Translating an educational curriculum at this scale is a different category of project from translating a single document or a set of product listings. The content is heterogeneous (technical in places, instructional in others, creative in others) and it must work for its intended audience: teenagers learning complex skills, often for the first time, in a self-directed environment. TUMO's request presented three challenges that required careful planning before a single word was translated.

1. Subject-matter diversity across 14 technical and creative disciplines

TUMO's curriculum does not belong to a single domain. A translator who handles robotics documentation fluently may not have the vocabulary or register for music production or filmmaking. Programming content requires precise technical terminology (variable names, function descriptions, debugging instructions) where errors do not just confuse students but break the learning activity entirely. Animation and graphic design content, by contrast, requires creative fluency and an understanding of industry-standard tools and workflows. Across 300,000 words, the content landscape shifts constantly, and assigning the full project to a generalist translation team would have produced inconsistent quality across disciplines. Each subject area needed linguists with direct familiarity with that field.

2. Basque as a minority language with a limited pool of technical translators

Basque (Euskara) is a language isolate (unrelated to any other known language) spoken by approximately 750,000 people, primarily in the Basque Country spanning northern Spain and southwestern France. It has no linguistic relatives, which means there is no cross-language terminology inheritance from Spanish, French, or any other major European language. Technical terms in robotics, programming, and game development have to be rendered into Basque using established neologisms maintained by the Basque language standardization body, Euskaltzaindia, or carefully constructed equivalents where standardized terms do not yet exist. The pool of translators who combine native Basque fluency with technical or creative domain knowledge is small, and sourcing qualified linguists for each of TUMO's 14 subject areas required dedicated recruitment effort.

3. Terminology consistency at scale across a multi-team, multi-discipline project

At 300,000 words split across multiple content sections and subject areas, consistency is a structural challenge, not just a quality preference. If "game loop" is translated one way in the game development module and a different way in a cross-disciplinary project lab that references it, students encounter contradictory terminology. If the Spanish used in the Buenos Aires center carries different vocabulary or register conventions from the Spanish used at other locations, the curriculum loses coherence as a unified program. A project of this size requires a terminology governance framework — not just a glossary, but a system for applying and enforcing consistent language decisions across every translator working on every module.

Why Tomedes?

TUMO reached out to Tomedes specifically because of its experience managing large-volume, multi-domain translation projects with complex quality assurance requirements. The representative of TUMO's program team outlined the project's scope, subject-matter diversity, and QA expectations clearly from the outset — and Tomedes' response addressed each requirement directly: subject-specialized linguist teams per discipline, a defined Basque translator recruitment process, a terminology management framework, and phased delivery capacity structured around TUMO's rollout schedule.

Tomedes also confirmed NDA compliance for all project materials, consistent with TUMO's confidentiality requirements for unpublished curriculum content.

The Solution

1. A discipline-mapped linguist team for both language pairs

Rather than assigning the full project to a single translation team, Tomedes structured the linguist assignment around TUMO's 14 subject areas. For Spanish, subject-matter expert translators were assigned to content clusters by domain: technical translators with programming and robotics backgrounds handled those modules; creative industry translators with animation, filmmaking, and graphic design experience handled the creative disciplines; and music-specialized translators handled the music production content. For Basque, Tomedes identified native Euskara translators with relevant domain backgrounds for each subject cluster and confirmed Euskaltzaindia-compliant terminology standards before work began. Each translator received the relevant section of the pre-approved terminology glossary for their domain before starting.

2. A master terminology glossary built before translation began

Tomedes worked with TUMO's program team to develop a master bilingual glossary (in both Spanish and Basque) covering the core technical and creative vocabulary across all 14 learning targets. This included standardized translations for tool names, discipline-specific terminology, instructional language conventions (e.g., how "learning target," "workshop," and "project lab" should be rendered consistently), and any TUMO-specific program terminology that did not have a direct equivalent in either target language. The glossary was locked and distributed to all translators before the first module was translated. Post-translation, the Consistency Checker was applied across completed modules to verify that glossary terms were applied uniformly — catching and correcting deviations before they accumulated across the full volume.

3. A phased delivery structure with QA checkpoints per module

Given the project's scale, Tomedes proposed a phased delivery model (translating and delivering content module by module rather than as a single batch) allowing TUMO's program team to review completed sections and provide feedback that could be incorporated into subsequent phases before the full volume was committed. Each module underwent a three-step QA process: translation by a subject-specialized linguist, independent editing by a second linguist in the same domain, and a final proofread pass before delivery. This structure gave TUMO a consistent quality baseline across disciplines and languages, and provided a natural checkpoint mechanism for any terminology or register adjustments identified during the review process.

Conclusion

TUMO's mission is to make world-class creative and technical education free and accessible to every teenager, regardless of where they live. Translating the curriculum that makes that possible into Spanish and Basque is not a logistical task, it is part of the mission itself. A student in the Basque Country learning robotics or game development for the first time should have access to the same quality of instruction as a student in Yerevan, in language that is precise, natural, and appropriate for a teenage learner. Tomedes structured the project to meet that standard across every discipline and both language pairs.

Is your organization preparing educational or training content for multilingual audiences? Contact Tomedes today for a free consultation.

Key Details