CHENNAI: Storyweaver by Pratham Books — India’s first open source, digital repository of children’s stories in 47 languages from around the world — has pledged to add stories and translations in 15 more languages. Beginning on World Literacy Day, September 8, they will launch ‘Freedom to Read’ campaign that will conclude on International Mother Language Day on February 21, 2017.
Through this initiative, they hope to give students more options to read in the language they are more fluent in. On Storyweaver, users can read, create, translate, download, print and share stories for free. “This is something that educators and linguists working with underprivileged children find useful. For example, we have a teacher from Himachal who translates stories to Tibetan because they don’t have a lot of children’s stories published in their language,” said Menaka Raman from Storyweaver.
Languages like Tibetan, Kora, Santali, Konkani, Sanskrit, Assamese and even international languages like Portuguese have seen prolific translations on the site. “We need people to identify the languages that have less published material, so that we can expand our database,” Raman added.
In the last year, Storyweaver has grown from 800 children’s stories in 24 languages to 2,000 stories in 47 languages.