Pratham Books is a not-for-profit children's book publisher that was set up in 2004 to publish good quality, affordable books in many Indian languages. Our mission is to see ‘a book in every child’s hand’ and we have spread the joy of reading to millions of children in India. As a publisher serving every child in India, Pratham Books has always pushed the boundaries when it comes to exploring innovative ways in which to create access to joyful stories and have been fortunate in finding partners to collaborate with who share this vision.
 
In 2015, Pratham Books' increased its footprint by going digital. As an industry leader, we were one of the first publishers in the country to open license our content. All this content is now available on StoryWeaver, which is a digital platform that hosts stories in languages from India and beyond, so that every child can have an endless stream of stories in her mother tongue to read and enjoy. The stories can be read, translated, versioned or downloaded for free. All stories on the platform are openly licensed.

Illustration by Kabini Amin from Dum Dum-a-Dum Biryani by Gayathri Tirthapura

We are looking for an Assistant Project Manager - Storyweaver

This position will work closely with the StoryWeaver content team to support the expansion of StoryWeaver’s global language content footprint. The role would involve identifying and  nurturing partner relationships for content in languages, supporting core team to maximise  partner engagement and support reporting and documentation. Must be someone who has the ability to network and make connections and is up to date with tech and social media trends. They also need to build strong relationships remotely. As nurturing language communities is a key focus area, a love for languages will help in bringing passion and commitment.

Key Responsibilities

• Project level support and coordination across various stakeholders to ensure timely completion of project deliverables.
• Identify and nurture partnership networks for language content.
• Support the core team in follow up on contracts, reporting, documentation and campaign processes.
• Support and facilitate translation workshops for scaling quality language resources on the platform.
• Work closely with the internal teams to implement StoryWeaver’s language goals.
• Help with research and documentation for impact assessment from content partner orgs.
• Contribute new ideas for both the function and platform.
• Support platform feature enhancements through testing.

Required skills

• Proven experience as a Project manager
• Ability to network and make connections
• Excellent organization skills
• Familiar with latest technology, trends in Social Media.
• Excellent communication skills in English and any other Indian language
• Willingness to travel to all project locations
• 1-2 years of experience

 Nice to have but not mandatory:

• Interest in languages, communities, books and education
• Social sector experience
• Fluency in the 2-3 languages

Location:

This is a full-time position based out of Bangalore

Compensation:

Salary will be commensurate with qualification and experience.

Write to us:

Email your resume with Assistant Project Manager- Storyweaver in the subject line to [email protected]

Be the first to comment.

---

Amelia Bonea is a historian based at the University of Oxford and author of the book The News of Empire: Telegraphy, Journalism, and the Politics of Reporting in Colonial India, c.1830-1900 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016). Originally from Romania, she has lived and worked in Japan, Australia, Germany and the United Kingdom. When not engaged in academic research, she likes to read and translate children’s literature, most recently on StoryWeaver.   

I was flattered when I was asked to contribute a post to the StoryWeaver blog to mark International Mother Language Day, celebrated on February 21st. The day also marks the conclusion of StoryWeaver's Freedom to Read Campaign launched in September last year. I was obviously flattered by the proposal, but I couldn’t help thinking that I was the wrong person for the job, since most of my adult life has been a move away from my mother tongue. These days, when I use Romanian, it is mostly to speak with members of my family on the phone or in occasional email conversations with friends, many of whom are themselves migrants scattered around the world.

‘It’s conservator, not conservativ’, my mother offers timidly, reminding me again that at some point over the last seventeen years, some invisible mechanism caused me to start translating words and expressions from English into Romanian, rather than the other way around. The lady who translates my birth certificate into English is bolder still: ‘Got you!’, she grins with the confidence of the professional, ‘It’s to write in Romanian, not to write down.’ I mumble some feeble excuse about having lived abroad for too long and head for the door with my pride visibly hurt. I am no language purist, but I care about how I speak, especially when I have ‘important’ business to conduct in my hometown.

I was born in communist Romania, during a time when bananas, chocolate and Coca Cola were prized commodities one learned to ration wisely so that they would last until uncle’s next visit home from university in Bucharest. I say Romania, but in fact I am more comfortable telling people that I am from Transylvania (not necessarily of Dracula and Bram Stoker fame, about which I came to know much later anyway, after I began my peregrinations abroad). As a child, I suspected that people from Bucharest were different: for one, they seemed to have easier access to foods we didn’t have and they kept referring to us as ‘provincials’; they also didn’t speak Romanian with a ‘Hungarian accent’, like we did. Not to be outdone, we reciprocated by feeling a tad superior to ‘those southerners’, among other things because of the dubious distinction of having once been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and thus exposed to the ‘civilizing’ influence of the West.

In any case, I grew up with a clear understanding that the Romanian with which the nation-state so eagerly wanted us to identify was not the same across the length and breadth of the country: people in the eastern province of Moldova were known to speak with a ‘sweet’ accent, while those in the south seemed to be excessively fond of the perfect simple tense. The Romanian I spoke at home was not the same my grandmother spoke in her village, peppered as it was with regionalisms whose meaning I tried hard to remember. And although my grandmother, a wonderful storyteller whose memory seemed to know no bounds, often populated my childhood with characters from her eventful life—she had lived through WWII as a child—sadly I find that my own memory falters when I try to remember some of the words she was using.   

Romanian was also not the only language I grew up with. In fact, it might be fair to say that I have two mother tongues, at least as far as hearing is concerned. There are many ethnic Hungarians living in Transylvania—as there once used to be Germans, my own aunt included—and Hungarian is one of the languages which reminds me of home, despite the fact that I only have a superficial knowledge of it. When I was in primary school, I made a pact with a Hungarian friend that we would teach one another our languages. We moved away and lost contact before I managed to learn how to speak, but it was not unusual to have ‘bilingual’ conversations with neighbours or shop assistants: people would ask questions in Hungarian and I would respond in Romanian or the other way around.

That’s how I learned that language wasn’t just speech, but a tool that could be used to play power games: one could use it to other people and by doing so, to stake a claim to a territory that did in fact belong to both interlocutors, not only to one or the other. I was reminded of these power games soon after the Revolution of December 1989, when our brief encounter with the Russian language as secondary school students was abruptly brought to an end by the new experiment with democracy and our teacher was made redundant. Russian fell out of favour practically overnight and we ended up studying French and English instead. All secondary school students were required to study two foreign languages at the time and we had no say as to which those two should be. What we knew was that studying English and French was ‘desirable’ as far as our future education and career prospects were concerned.

When I finally had a say in the matter, I decided to learn Japanese and moved to Japan to study for a university degree in Asian Area Studies. Once there, I became interested in the colonial history of South Asia and began to study Hindi as well. The big difference from my previous linguistic encounters was that these languages did not use the Roman alphabet and so they completely unsettled my ideas about the world: from a relatively small pool of 26-31 letters, I found myself thrown into a seemingly endless ocean of characters which I wasn’t always sure how they differed from each other. It was easier with Hindi, but I still can’t remember the order of the Devanagari script, which makes searching a word in a dictionary a time-consuming affair (and yes, I have the same problem in Japanese, but I console myself with the knowledge that some of my Japanese colleagues have the same problem with the Roman alphabet).

 

Much later, I also came to realize that these linguistics encounters have tweaked my brain in other, more subtle ways. I often find myself listening not only to what people say, but also to how they say it. I pay attention to their use of vocabulary and grammar. I read posters and billboards not necessarily because I am interested in the ads, but because I want to know what that character or expression means. Come to think of it, living abroad feels like a continuous language learning exercise. It gets tiring at times, but it is also exciting and enriching. Languages opened doors into worlds I didn’t know or knew little about. More than anything perhaps, learning languages has taught me to listen. Yoko Tawada, herself a straddler of worlds who lives in Germany and writes in German and Japanese, wrote in her book Where Europe Begins that, ‘Perhaps the ear is the organ of storytelling, not the mouth. Why else was the poison poured into the ear of Hamlet’s father rather than his mouth? To cut off a person from the world, you must first destroy not his mouth but his ear.’ I am reaching a stage in my life where I feel that I have come full circle and can now begin to translate some of the things I heard back into Romanian. And what better place to begin than with some of the best examples of storytelling out there, children’s books?

You can read Amelia's translations to Romanian on StoryWeaver here.

Be the first to comment.

---

Settle down for this long read that comes to our blog all the way from the Phillipines.

It’s 7:30AM in Antipolo, Rizal, a suburban city in the Philippines, and Saida D. is on her knees, polishing the production floor of the four-storey office building where she works as a cleaning lady and messenger. In a few minutes, the employees will start to arrive one by one to fulfill Localization and Translation projects for companies and governments around the world.

Saida took over the job from her mother, Aida, herself a career househelp. In the Philippines, the wages for domestic help can be as low as US$60 a month, and Filipino women especially in the rural areas have very few options aside from working in agriculture — which does not pay well and is subject to uncertainty in a disaster-prone country like the Philippines.

The lack of occupational opportunities is itself a result of an educational system that has faced tremendous challenges in recent times. In 2008, UNESCO reported a drastic decline in participation and achievement rates in basic education in the Philippines: from a high of 96.8 percent in 2000, net enrolment rates at the elementary level dropped back to 84.4 percent in 2005 (even lower than the 85.1 percent in 1991). Education spending as a percentage of overall government expenditures has declined from 18.2 percent in 1998 to 12.4 percent in 2005.

Data from the Philippines Department of Education shows that in 2015, only 3 of every 5 children who enter grade school will graduate from high school. The Philippines' youth literacy rate fell from 96.6 percent in 1990 to 95.1 percent in 2003, making it the only Southeast Asian country to register declining youth literacy rates.

Aida, the retired househelp and Saida's mother, took it upon herself to help her community beat the odds by helping organize a volunteer-run day care center. It is at this day care center where Saida leaves her children in the morning before travelling to work. The day care center relies on donations from parents and is run by a volunteer teacher who does not get a salary.

One day last April, the children at Aida's volunteer-run day care center received visitors who brought books written in Filipino, the national language of the Philippines. The children have received donations of books before, but many of the books were written in English. The books that they received that day were in their native language, and were created through Pratham Books' Storyweaver platform.

 

 

A smiling Aida stands in the doorway of her day care centre watching an activity filled classroom. 

For many of these children, the books they received and took home that day were the very first books they will ever own in their lives. Behind the books is a story that has come full circle.

The books were translated, printed and distributed by a group of volunteers led the wife-and-husband team of Judy and Jake Estrada, who is himself a son of a former househelp.

The building -- and the Language company -- where Aida used to work, and where Saida now works, is owned by Jake.

Jake is the founder of  QwertyWorks, a translation enterprise based out of Manila, Philippines. A former freelance translator, Jake has always focused on propagating Tagalog and other Philippine languages through translation and localization work.

“Unlike in India, Europe and East Asia, we actually don't have a considerable localization market in the Philippines, owing to the fact that majority of Filipinos are able to understand and speak English fairly well. This is why our consumer goods are labelled monolingually in English by default, and most of our road signs are in English -- despite the fact that most Filipinos do not "think" in English, but rather in their native tongues (e.g. Tagalog, Cebuano, Hiligaynon, etc.)” shared Jake over email.

“That said, whenever a Filipino reads any material in his or her native language, a deeper emotional attachment is created between that person and the material (or the product). Since no "thought conversion" is involved because the language used is the person's "thinking language", the message becomes more credible, personal and enduring.”

Jake believes that this is especially true for books and literature as one is able to make a deeper connect with stories in one's mother tongue. It was this "native-language human understanding" that served as the underlying purpose at QwertyWorks, the company he founded.

Since 2001, QwertyWorks has grown to become the 'go-to' Philippine-language vendor for companies with a team of more than 50 in-house linguists, Project Managers, business managers and admin staff working out of Manila, plus linguists located in more than 60 countries around the world.

“We've been wanting to pay it forward for sometime now,” Jake shared. “As we entered our 15th year of operation in 2016, we decided to look overseas for collaborations to propagate our language. I was referred to Translators Without Borders (which I joined), then the Rosetta Foundation. It was through Rosetta that I stumbled upon Pratham Books and the StoryWeaver platform.”

Jake translated his first book on StoryWeaver last year ("Bheema the Sleepyhead") and loved the experience. When he shared it with his team at QwertyWorks, they loved the idea too and team members volunteered to translate stories on StoryWeaver in their own time. “Nevertheless, since we do have an established CSR program, the company also allows (and encourages) the linguists to work on select books on company time whenever our workload allows it.” informed Jake.

Till date, the QwertyWorks team has already translated a total of 64 books to Filipino, Cebuano and Cebuano-Davao. 

It was one of these books that his wife Judy brought to Aida's volunteer-run community day care center in late-April, which served as a pilot for what hopes to be a countrywide grassroots book distribution program.

The book had been translated by the QwertyWorks team on StoryWeaver, then Jake and Judy printed the book at home and stapled the pages together.

Here’s an excerpt from Jake's email:

“I just wanted to let you know that one of the several Filipino books we did on Storyweaver has been successfully distributed to a pilot group of 64 children aged 3 to 5 years old.”

 

Two groups of around 20 children each attend the local summer classes taught by a volunteer teacher. The teacher read the book out loud to the first class of children aged 4-5 years old, and the children participated in the activity by mimicking the characters in the story. Afterwards, they took the book home. The second group (children aged 3-4 years old) came in after an hour, and did the same thing. All of the books were distributed for free at no charge to the recipients nor to the day care center.

 

A mother reading with two boys at the session.

“Today's event was a pilot of a program that aims to do 3 things: book creation (digitally), self-printing and self-distribution of printed material. The idea was to jumpstart discovery: by making children and their parents get their hands on the printed versions, we hope to urge them to visit StoryWeaver on their own where more books are available. Today there really was 'a book in every child's hand', at least in this day care center!”

“For many of the children, the book they got today was the very first book they ever took home, as their own. The teacher encouraged the parents to read the book to their children at home, even at bedtime. More importantly, it is written in their native language (Filipino), so this removes some of the common barriers at least here in the Philippines.

We aim to do this more regularly to more communities here, and expand to more languages and provinces in the Philippines.”

“Please do wish us luck as we are a small volunteer team. Yes, we do this all for free -- from translation to printing and distribution -- we do hope that we'll have enough physical, financial and emotional endurance to cover the remaining 7,100 islands of our country :-)

We don't know how we'll do that but we'll take it one day at a time.”

His wife Judy, herself a former private-school teacher, has also launched Libreo.ph, a portal where she is distributing books translated on StoryWeaver. Plans are afoot to translate more Storyweaver books into other Philippine languages (such as Ilokano, Hiligaynon and Pangasinan). QwertyWorks is also onboarding linguists overseas who would be willing to participate in the CSR initiative for Thai, Burmese, Malay, etc.

 

 

 

“I personally "began" translating as a 15-year old, translating books donated by the United Nations from English into Tagalog, for free. It is through translation and books that I found my calling, and my livelihood.”, writes Jake, who along with four other siblings was raised almost single-handedly by his mother Hermelina, who started working as a househelp outside of Manila in the 1960s.

Back at Jake's office building, Saida is finishing up her work so she could go home early to her children. Saida's sister, Czarina, is a product of the community day-care center that their mother Aida helped put up. Today, Czarina is now a teacher herself, having graduated in 2016, the year Aida retired from cleaning the premises of the QwertyWorks office.

While Czarina embarks on being an educator herself, Saida the office-cleaner hopes that her children will someday finish college as well, with far better life options than she ever had. Who knows, one of them might even have their own office building someday, bigger than QwertyWorks's!

All the very best to Jake and his amazing team at QwertyWorks! We’re so lucky to be able to collaborate with passionate language champions such as yourself!

You can read Team QwertWorks' translations on StoryWeaver, here.

If you’re using StoryWeaver to help put ‘a book in every child’s hand’ and would like to share your story, write to us at [email protected]!

 

Be the first to comment.

---