StoryWeaver turns three!

Posted by Remya Padmadas on September 08, 2018

September 8th holds a special place in our hearts. For starters, it’s International Literacy Day, a day that highlight the importance of literacy to individuals, communities and societies. September 8th also witnesses thousands of volunteers across the country read stories to children as part of Pratham Books’ One Day, One Story. And oh... it also happens to be StoryWeaver’s birthday!

(Image from 'Springloaded' published by BookDash. Written by Sam Wilson and Chenél Ferreira Illustrated by Thea Nicole de Klerk)

Today, we turn three! For such a young platform, we’ve taken some pretty big steps over the last three years. We’ve grown from 800 stories in 24 languages to over 9000 stories in 120 languages. We have a wonderful, collaborative community of users from over 190 countries reading, sharing, writing and translating stories on StoryWeaver and committed  partners working hand-in-hand with us to take the joy of reading to more children.

In the coming week, we’ll be celebrating three years of wonderful stories, three years of amazing on ground partners, three years of fabulous CC publishers, language champions and community members. We do hope you’ll tune in to read and watch how they’ve helped us take the joy of reading to more children across the world.

To each and everyone of you who have helped us take stories to places stories couldn’t go before: THANK YOU! Our achievements are really yours. Each and every thing you do on and with StoryWeaver, no matter how big or small, helps us move a little closer to realising the dream of ‘a book in every child’s hand.’

And lastly, to all the children out there: keep reading. We promise to always have something for you to read.
 

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Are you with the Department of Languages at your University? We’d like to collaborate with you on a translation project.

Posted by Remya Padmadas on September 29, 2017

At StoryWeaver, we believe that all children, everywhere, should have access to a never ending stream of stories in their mother tongue. If you are a language department head or professor at your University, then do consider signing up your class for our new translation campaign.

We are looking for student volunteers to help us translate stories to a language they are learning on StoryWeaver. Students can be assigned stories, which you, their professor reviewing their work before publishing. This can be an excellent project students can sign up to improve their language skills while contributing to a growing pool of openly licensed multilingual stories for children to practice and improve their reading skills.  

This model has been highly successful with some of our other partners like the Ugandan Christian University (UCU). As a part of the UCU Community Service Project: ‘Creative Writing, Translation and Publishing for Children’ in the Department of Languages and Literature, 50 stories have been translated to Ugandan languages to supplement early literacy initiatives.The project seeks to make mother tongue reading material  accessible to children of the local communities in Uganda through the UCU campuses and colleges.

StoryWeaver

StoryWeaver is India’s first open source, digital repository of multilingual children’s books from Pratham Books, a non-profit children’s book publisher. Pratham Books has a mission is to see ‘a book in every child’s hand’ and was founded to address the lack of high quality, affordable, multilingual books in India. We realised that to even begin satisfying the reading needs of a multilingual country such as India, and create equitable access to books for all children we would need to massively scale the creation and distribution of multilingual content. The answer, we believed lay in technology and the power of open licensing.  

StoryWeaver offers educators, non-profits, language champions and book lovers across the world access to over 5000 stories in 100 languages. All these stories are free to read, download, print and share for free, as they are openly licensed under CC-BY 4.0, one of the most liberal Creative Commons licenses. StoryWeaver is accessed from a 350,000 plus (and growing!) strong community from over 180 countries around the world. Stories on the platform have collectively been read (both online and offline) 2 million times.

To sign up your department click here, and help us create more stories in more languages for more children.    

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A community comes together to safeguard their language

Posted by Amna Singh on October 01, 2018
CGNet Swara has been working with the Gond community since 2014 and believes that creating relevant Gondi language content and using modern technology to bring it to people is the only way to ensure it can survive and flourish. The effort in translating children's books to Gondi with StoryWeaver involves creating content for children, who are critical for any language's long-term survival. The translated books will be distributed to children in schools, while the audio version will also be played over Adivasi Swara. Microsoft Research India and IIIT-Naya Raipur are also planning to use the translation of these books as data input for a Gondi machine translation algorithm that can facilitate the languages use on the internet and other forums. Devansh Mehta from CGNet Swara writes for the StoryWeaver blog. 
 
The Gondi speaking Adivasis (tribals) residing in 7 states across central India face a unique problem. They are not able converse with each other because they speak Gondi influenced by the state languages – Andhra Adivasis speak Telugu influenced Gondi, Maharashtra Adivasis speak Marathi influenced Gondi, etc.

Beginning in 2014, the Adivasi community has mobilized themselves to save their language and culture. Over 8 workshops, Gondi speakers from all 7 states got together to create the first standard Gondi lexicon. In the 9th workshop, Gondi speakers met with researchers from Microsoft Research India to discuss how their language can be taken online. The consensus at the meeting was that before any work could start, there needed to be 100,000 lines of translation from Gondi to a mainstream language.

In the 10th and most recent workshop with Pratham Books' StoryWeaver team, over 20 Gondi speakers from 3 different states gathered together from September 18th to September 28th to translate children’s books from Hindi to Gondi. The purpose of the workshop was two-fold: creating a repository of children’s stories in Gondi which can be distributed in schools, and gathering enough data to build a machine translation tool.
 

 Workshop participants translating children’s stories to Gondi
 
The workshop had a good mix of people from a variety of backgrounds. There were some attendees like Suresh Kumar Katrani who were pursuing their master’s degree in physics and had taken leave from his job to attend the workshop. As a high school teacher in Bastar, one of the largest Gondi speaking areas, Suresh attended the workshop as he felt their language was diminishing and would die out with his generation unless the community pulled together and did something.
 
Most participants were unlike Suresh and had never even seen a computer prior the workshop. They had been recruited through CGnet Swara’s yatra team, a group of actors and musicians who travel and perform at remote, Gondi-speaking villages.
 
 

 The truck that CGnet uses to travel and perform at Gondi-speaking villages
 
One of the participants who joined the workshop through the yatra was Kumari Shashila, a 5th grade dropout. Due to a basic knowledge of Hindi, her translation skills were rudimentary and she had to work with people like Suresh to understand the meaning of words that needed to be translated to Gondi. However, the participation of people like her ensured that the children’s books and the machine translation tool would accurately mirror the Gondi spoken by the vast majority of Gondi speakers, not just the affluent, educated sections.

 
Kumari Shashila, a Gondi speaker from Orchha, Koilebeda, Kanker, who attended the Gondi translation workshop after meeting the yatra team
 
Over the course of the workshop, a total of 400 children’s stories were translated to Gondi, out of which 175 have already been put online as of today. As most of these communities lack Internet access, many of these books were printed and given to the workshop participants to take back to their village. A total of roughly 10,000 lines were translated over the course of 10 days.

In the coming few months, we are planning to build on this effort and obtain funding to print and distribute these books in the villages that the yatra team travels to. We also plan to hold many more such workshops to reach the magical figure of 100,000 lines. If you would like to help or contribute to this effort, you can email [email protected]
 
You can read the stories translated at the Gondi workshop here.
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