In an attempt to increase the amount of online health information in Arabic, Hindi, and Swahili languages Google.org has launched a new initiative called Health Sparks to translate content that generates donations to regional medical centers.
The initiative aims to help increase the amount of high-quality online health information in local languages which started 5 days ago is beginning pilot projects to support community-based, crowd-sourced translation of health information from English into Arabic, Hindi and Swahili.
Google is trying to encourage anyone with health knowledge who is bilingual in English and either Arabic, Hindi or Swahili to take part in the pilot projects for Health Speaks. Google has chosen hundreds of good quality English language health articles from Wikipedia that we hope will be translated with the assistance of Google Translator Toolkit or any other sufficient tool, made locally relevant, reviewed and then published to the corresponding local language Wikipedia site.
The way it works is by providing a donation incentive to encourage community translators to participate. For the first 60 days, 3 cents (US) will be donated for each English word translated to the Children’s Cancer Hospital Egypt 57357, the Public Health Foundation of India and the African Medical and Research Foundation (AMREF) for the pilots in Arabic, Hindi and Swahili, respectively, up to $50,000 each.
I personally think this is a great initiative on multiple levels, one of which is for individuals to provide access to quality health information in a local language, while also supporting a local non-profit organization working in health or health education.
So if your willing to help children with cancer, seize the opportunity, translators have 55 more days to do as much translation as they can for a truly good cause.
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