The Language Equality Initiative Offers Solutions for Underserved Languages
Translators without Borders is spearheading a cross-industry effort that brings together a coalition of technologists, native speaker communities, humanitarian organizations, content creators and owners, and private and public donors to fund investment in language data, making it useful and free of charge to all. Gamayun: The Language Equality Initiative focuses on building text and speech data that make it easier to automate underserved languages. Using a repeatable, scalable model, TWB and our coalition of partners are piloting one to three languages in 2018 to test and refine our methodology and partnerships. Over the next decade, our goal is to bring 20 underserved languages online, creating a useful, sustainable and free asset to empower people through greater access to critical information.
If you’re interested in learning more about the initiative, there are many ways to participate.
Read our white paper below, “Gamayun: The Language Equality Initiative - Solutions for Underserved Languages.”
- Contribute healthcare, crisis relief, education and/or job skilling content to grow the usefulness of the data set.
- Share parallel data – TWB’s focus in 2018 is on Bengali, Hausa and/or Kiswahili but parallel data in any underserved language is welcome.
- Volunteer your expertise – in localization, project management, content creation and/or engineering.
Support the initiative by contributing unrestricted funding to Translators without Borders. Donate Now.
A partial list of our partners: Acrolinx, Amazon, American Red Cross, The Barefoot Guides, BBC Media Action, CDAC-Network members, The Cisco Foundation, CrowdFlower, Facebook, Google, impact.org, Language Connect, The Localization Institute, Meedan, National Institutes of Health (NHI), International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, Microsoft Corporation, Shongjog (Bangladesh), StoryWeaver, Translation Automation User Society (TAUS), United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Innovation Fund United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA), World Health Organization (WHO).