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Bangladeshis race against time to add 400,000 Bangla words to Google Translate
Several thousand volunteers are racing against time to add 400,000 Bangla words to Google Translate to commemorate Bangladesh’s Independence Day.
Published : 26 March 2015, 05:08 PM
Updated : 27 March 2015, 02:17 AM
The initiative, co-organised by the ICT Division, Google Developers Group and Bangladesh Computer Council (BCC), kicked off on Thursday morning at Agargaon.
It will continue until 6am Friday.
Organisers say adding so many words in a single day will be a record.
State Minister for ICT Zunaid Ahmed Palak visited the BCC in the afternoon to egg the participants on.
He said Bangla was not rich enough on Google’s Translate app although it is the seventh most spoken language in the world.
“We hope to achieve twice our target by morning at the pace we’re working,” the young minister said.
The Google server had crashed twice after 11am on Thursday after about 10,000 users logged in simultaneously, he said.
Google Translate is a free online language translation service that supports 90 languages, according to Google Inc.
Anyone can add new words or sentences to it by going to http://translate.google.com/community
Sixty-five thousand Bangla words were added to Google Translate on Feb 21, the second highest after Spanish on that day.
Google will reveal the number of words added on Mar 26 to Translate on Friday morning. But the project will run until Bangla new year ‘Pahela Baishakh’.
Palak said the search engine giant would take the person who will have added most Bangla words by Apr 14 on a three-day study tour to its Singapore office.
The individual will also get electronic certificates from Google and the ICT ministry.
He awarded 11 people on Thursday for adding most number of words.
One of them, Dhaka University student Ibrahim Mustarin, said most of those involved in the initiative were students.
“Those using Google Translate will be immensely benefitted,” he told bdnews24.com.
“We love Bangla,” another winner, AIUB student Dibakar Sahil said. “We want Bangla to be enriched like any other language on Google Translate.”
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