Ever wished to read medical articles in Malayalam, that too sans medical jargons? Log on to Wikipedia. Taking a cue from the Wikipedia project of translating medical articles, the Malayalam Wikimedians have started translating popular medical articles in Wikipedia to Malayalam.
Wikipedia’s medical articles have 15-20 crore page views every month. The top 300 articles are viewed more than 1 lakh times every month. Since the articles are mostly in English and some rich with medical jargons, an interesting project was conceptualised to translate it to as many languages as possible. WikiProject Medicine, Wikimedia Canada and an organisation called ‘Translators Without Borders’ put forward the idea. Now, the Malayalam Wikimedians are actively participating in the translations. The goal is to translate a set of 80 of the most important health care articles into as many languages as possible.
Currently, elaborate articles on asthma, pneumonia and stroke are available in Malayalam. Netha Hussain of Kozhikode, Suraj Rajan of Thiruvananthapuram, Irvin of Kozhikode and Jerin Philip of Kannur are active in translating articles. Except Jerin, who is a student, all others are from the medical field. Apart from translating, the contributors also can update more information, related pictures etc.
The original project that began in 2011 was to translate articles first to simple English and then to as many as languages as possible. Apart from Malayalam, Hindi, Assamese, Tamil and Telugu are the other languages registered with the project. Other non-Indian languages participating in the project are Swahili, Arabic, Russian, Slovene, Spanish, Japanese and Nepali.
Malayalam Wikipedia is active with a slew of projects such as ‘Malayalam loves Wikipedia,’ ‘Wikidictionary’, ‘Wikiquotes’ etc.