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

TUMO is changing what free education looks like for teenagers. Tomedes helped make sure that change could happen in Spanish and Basque.

About TUMO

TUMO Center for Creative Technologies is a free after-school program operating in 20+ countries, giving teenagers aged 12 to 18 access to world-class creative technology education at no cost. Founded in Yerevan, Armenia, TUMO now serves 35,000+ active students across centers in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the Americas. Students learn at their own pace across 14 focus areas (animation, game development, robotics, filmmaking, music, programming, and more) guided by a proprietary learning platform called the TUMO Path that builds a personalized curriculum based on each student's interests. There are no fees, no grades, and no entrance exams.

TUMO's expansion into Spanish and Basque-speaking regions brought a new translation challenge: a substantial body of instructional, technical, and creative curriculum content that had to work for teenagers learning complex skills, often for the first time, in a self-directed environment.

Industry and Services

• Education / Nonprofit Translation 

• Localization English to Spanish and Basque

The Challenge

Translating an educational curriculum at this scale is a different category of project from translating a single document or a product catalog. 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 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 a large and heterogeneous body of content, the subject landscape shifts constantly, and assigning the full project to a generalist team would have produced inconsistent quality across disciplines. Each subject area needed linguists with direct familiarity with that field.

2. A register built for teenage self-directed learners, not academic instruction

TUMO's pedagogical model is built on intrinsic motivation. The curriculum is designed to feel like exploration, not coursework – it speaks directly to students, uses plain language, and avoids the formal register of traditional educational materials. This tone is not accidental; it is central to TUMO's mission of making learning feel accessible to teenagers who may have been failed by conventional schooling. Translating that register into Spanish and Basque required linguists who understood not just the language but the audience (teenagers navigating a self-learning environment) and who could preserve the warmth and directness of the original without importing the formal academic register that standard educational translation tends to default to.

3. Basque as a minority language with a specialist translator pool

Spanish presented a large, well-resourced translation challenge. Basque presented a different kind of challenge entirely. Basque (Euskara) is a language isolate with no known relatives – its linguistic structure, vocabulary, and conventions share nothing with Spanish, French, or any other neighboring language. The pool of qualified translators with both Basque fluency and the technical vocabulary to handle creative technology curriculum is narrow. Sourcing a team with the right combination of subject-matter competence and Basque language proficiency required targeted recruitment from Tomedes' specialist linguist network, not a standard assignment process.

Why Tomedes?

TUMO selected Tomedes for its ability to assemble specialist linguist teams across heterogeneous content domains and its experience with large-scale educational localization projects. The Basque component in particular required Tomedes to source translators with a combination of technical subject-matter depth and Basque language competence, a pairing that is rare in the professional translation market.

A dedicated project manager with experience coordinating multi-domain educational content projects structured the workflow to ensure subject-area consistency: each of the 14 learning targets was assigned to a linguist with relevant domain expertise, and a cross-domain editorial review was conducted at the end of each content cluster before delivery.

The Solution

1. A domain-matched linguist team across 14 subject areas

Rather than assigning the project to a generalist translation team, Tomedes built a domain-matched linguist roster for both Spanish and Basque – pairing each of TUMO's 14 learning targets with translators who held relevant subject-matter backgrounds. Programming and robotics content was handled by linguists with technical software backgrounds. Animation and graphic design content was assigned to translators with creative technology experience. Music production content went to a linguist with audio production familiarity. This domain-matching approach ensured that the technical vocabulary in each subject area was rendered accurately and consistently, and that the instructional logic of the activities translated correctly into both target languages.

2. A register review layer to preserve TUMO's student-facing voice

Following the main translation pass, a dedicated register review was conducted by senior editors in both Spanish and Basque – focused specifically on ensuring that the student-facing voice of the curriculum had been preserved. The review identified instances where technically accurate translations had defaulted to a more formal instructional register than the source material intended, and produced targeted revisions that restored the direct, accessible tone that TUMO's pedagogical model depends on. This layer was applied uniformly across all 14 subject areas in both languages.

3. Basque specialist sourcing and quality assurance

The Basque translation team was sourced through targeted outreach within Tomedes' specialist linguist network, prioritizing candidates with both verified Basque fluency and documented subject-matter experience in at least one of TUMO's technical disciplines. The majority of learning targets were covered with direct domain expertise, and the remainder with subject-matter-adjacent backgrounds supplemented by a dedicated Basque technical review pass. All Basque content was reviewed by a second Basque-fluent linguist before delivery to confirm terminology consistency and register alignment across the full curriculum.

The Result

When TUMO's new centers opened in Spanish and Basque-speaking regions, every module of the curriculum (from animation briefs to robotics debugging guides to filmmaking project labs) was available in language written for the students who would use it. Not translated for a generic audience, but localized for teenagers encountering these subjects for the first time in a self-directed learning environment.

The full curriculum was delivered across both languages on a phased schedule aligned with TUMO's center opening timeline, with no subject-area terminology issues raised during the post-deployment review. TUMO's expansion into Spanish and Basque-speaking communities continued without curriculum readiness delays.

TUMO's mission is a world where any teenager, regardless of geography, income, or academic history, has access to world-class creative technology education. Tomedes' role in this project was to make sure the language was never the barrier.

Are you expanding an educational program, curriculum, or learning platform into new language markets? Contact Tomedes today for a free consultation.

"We needed to tackle a particularly demanding translation project: producing high-quality and heavy content in both Castilian Spanish and Basque (Euskara). Finding a translation agency with truly native, professional Basque translators was a real challenge. Basque is a unique and complex language, and working with anything less than native experts was simply not an option for us. Tomedes rose to that challenge really well.

From the first interaction, Tomedes stood out for their exceptional responsiveness – questions were answered quickly and clearly, which immediately inspired confidence. Beyond speed, it was their professionalism and the background of their translators that sealed the deal. Knowing that our content would be handled by qualified native professionals gave us complete confidence.

Tomedes has consistently delivered on time, allowing us to meet the deadlines we had set from the outset and maintain full control over our project timelines. Whenever we provided feedback on translations, the team responded swiftly and constructively. That level of flexibility and commitment to quality has made Tomedes a genuinely reliable partner for our business."

Hasmik Akopian, Launch Manager, TUMO International

Key Details