Earlier this year, the folks over at Open.Michigan launched a pilot program to crowdsource the translation of transcripts for some of their videos. The pilot focused on 31 health videos, including 12 clinical microbiology videos co-authored by instructors in Ghana and Michigan and 19 disaster management videos co-authored by seven schools of public health in East Africa.
They now have 11 languages represented in their video subtitles, including Luganda – a local language spoke in Uganda – demonstrating how crowdsourcing can create materials for significantly underserved learners. They recently posted an interview with one of the volunteer Luganda translators, Eve Nabulya, which includes this excerpt:
I selected the disaster management videos because they were co-authored by my peers at Makerere University. To date, I have translated three videos: Intro to Disaster Management Training, Introduction to Disasters, and Epidemics.
Projects such as this, which aim to increase the volume of learning materials in local Ugandan languages, would achieve much by partnering with universities. At the moment, Makerere University alone graduates over 100 students in Bantu languages every year. Given that Luganda is one of the two local languages considered by the recent Constituent Assembly as potential national languages, any efforts that produce literature and resources in it, especially learning materials, draw Uganda closer to solving her language dilemma. Read more.
