StoryWeaver is proud of the small role it plays in the preservation of languages. Our collaborations with language organisations, educators and NGOs has helped in creating joyful reading material in languages such as Konkani, Tibetan and Kora and Santali, thus ensuring that they are passed on to the next generation of learners.  The ‘Freedom to Read’ campaign was our effort to make many more stories available in languages that are underserved and underrepresented in the mainstream.

Languages like Jèrriais. Jèrriais is a minority, endangered language, spoken in the island of Jersey, off the coast of France. To pull it out of this status and keep it alive, various schools in Jersey have started teaching Jèrriais and organisations have been made to protect the language by promoting literature, music, and any other sources of the language. Anthony Scott Warren, one of the few teachers of the language, asked us to add Jèrriais to StoryWeaver. 

"In the 1990s it was realised by the States of Jersey government, that the number of Jèrriais speakers was in serious decline and that as there was no longer inter-generational transfer of the language, a programme to teach it needed to be set up.  There were no qualified Jèrriais teachers working in the Education Department, so the States outsourced the programme to Le Don Balleine, a will trust who set up L’Office du Jèrriais to run lessons in primary schools from the start of 1999." shared Anthony.

Jèrriais lessons began in secondary schools in 2001 and were optional and generally outside normal school hours. In some schools,  children could attend Jèrriais instead of assembly. "I was initially the only employee, but later the team expanded to 2.8 equivalent full-time teachers.  We currently are training two new teachers to take over when I and one other teacher retire." says Anthony who is hoping (subject to funding from the States of Jersey) to increase the teaching provision to 4 teachers and to run lessons in grades 4 to 6 (ages 8 – 11) in curriculum time.  "We also plan to increase the provision in secondary schools and to develop an immersion programme in nurseries and Foundation stage."

Anthony plans to use the stories  he is translating on StoryWeaver in his lessons, which are generally for beginners.  "I’ll be making laminated flipbooks to take to the classrooms.  We would ideally like to add the stories to our new LearnJèrriais website which is intended to go live later this year.  We are also planning to have a Story and Rhyme Time feature at the Jersey Library each week, and these stories will fit in very well."

Currently  40 children are learning Jèrriais, but Anthony hopes to increase to at least 200 children per year in the next five years. We look forward to seeing more stories in Jèrriais on StoryWeaver and hearing about the wonderful work Anthony and his colleagues are doing!

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We're very fortunate to have such an wonderfully enthusiastic community of readers, authors, translators and illustrators. This International Translation Day, we'd like to share with you the reflections of a group of translators who attended our Bengali Hackathon earlier this year. The contributors to this article all belong to the student community. While Sreejita Majumdar did her schooling from Patha Bhavan, graduation from Calcutta University and post graduation diploma in Public Relations and Multimedia. She has also done an internship with the news channel 24 Ghanta and is currently learning Spanish from JU. Her hobby is painting and her passion lies in football, films and animals. Ankita Basu has done her schooling from B.D Memorial and is currently pursuing her graduation from Calcutta University. She's passionate about films, books and writing. Banhi Sarkar has done her schooling from Gokhale Memorial and graduated from Calcutta University. She loves films and books as well and is interested in writing. 

A bunch of us got the unique opportunity to take part in a translation workshop as arranged by StoryWeaver on the weekend of 30th June and 1st July, 2018. The group included people from diverse backgrounds, such as school teachers, students, college professors and language enthusiasts. We had a great time translating quite a few stories over the two days and decided to give a feedback on the same so that it helps in further improving the translation workshops to be held in future.

It was a very unique experience in terms of both learning and working on the given stories set to translate. Even for participants in the group who have been to other translation workshops before, this one was more engaging and enjoyable with a much more prompt delivery of the assigned work. We all got to meet a lot of new people with the same interests and passion in the field of translation. The fact that the participants ranged from school teachers to college professors to students made it a very dynamic group to work with. The coordinators provided a very free and relaxed environment, which made the experience all the more pleasurable.

It was definitely a challenge to work on children’s stories. None of us had realized previously that translating for adults and translating for children could be two completely opposite poles of the same spectrum. But working in small teams and pre-assigned two to three stories eased the way. We could engage in discussions, ask for advice when in confusion and help out others, all within the stipulated time. The two days period seemed to fly by, and though it was tiresome, it was equally productive and satisfying.

However, we did face some challenges in the way which led us to discussions on ways to improve the experience even further for future translators. There were certain aspects we all agreed on regarding the difficulties we faced. We realized since our target audience is children, care needs to be taken to make sure that the words we choose not just have literal significance but that they are both easy and understandable and can fall under the regular vocabulary of a child. For example, in this story there were quite a few words that had to be translated keeping in mind the vocabulary of the children of level 2 in the Bengali translation of  The Louse's New House.

The Bengali language is so vast, rich and diverse that it becomes a further challenge to aptly translate all kinds of work from English to Bengali across the entire expanse of its existence. Throughout Bengal, there exists numbers of dialects and forms of the language. As a result, it is important to keep in mind that the translated work should be universal in the sense that it can appeal to a child of both the urban city and the rural village within the same state. For example, we faced situations where a particular word may sound totally innocent on hearing at first, but on further probe, we discovered it may have a negative connotation in a different dialect. So a detailed knowledge about such contradictory words and situations need to be there within the team for effective translation. Also, in the following story for example, there was much pondering over the correct translated word of ‘smooth’ in Bengali that could rightfully carry over the intended meaning from the English to the Bengali version of the story Stick Your Tongue Out!  

There were quite a few words related to sound that more or less all the teams came across in one or all of their stories during translation. One such example is Miss Laya Starts Her Fantastic Motorbike in Bengali. That’s when we faced difficulty to find the exact word in Bengali that would correspond to the one already used in English. Since it’s quite common to come across such words in children’s stories, we feel it would be great if there was a reference book where all commonly appeared sound words could be listed along with their regional counterparts and their varying connotations. That would save a lot of time and confusion the next time we translate any story containing such words.

Since this is truly a one of a kind endeavour, it would be highly appreciated if more publicity could be done regarding this platform. More schools need to be aware of it so that they can include the exercise of reading translated stories to their children across different classrooms and thereby lead to a much wider readership. As already discussed at the end of our workshops, many teachers who participated in it decided to take it forward to their schools and start a curriculum based on reading of these translated stories to their students.

It would be very effective if the future workshops could involve people from varying regions and state, in short a cross-regional/national workshop where teachers, translators and writers could participate and interact on a much wider scale to bring about more and more significant children’s stories to light. This could lead to a discovery of more unique works, which usually remain confined within the geographical boundaries, and can reach more children beyond language and cultural barriers.It’s important to keep a balance between the variety of stories being translated and worked upon for children. New ideas and concepts are always welcoming, but we could also work on the classics in each language which may be quite famous in that particular language and thus known to the children of that mother tongue but perhaps remain unknown in other languages. This could help translate the works of authors in regional languages as well.

 

In short, it was a beautiful and cherishable experience that we all hope to continue beyond the workshop in future. We wish all the very best and give our warm wishes to the entire team of StoryWeaver and Pratham Books for their future endeavours.

You can read all the stories translated at the hackathon here. 

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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]!

 

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