multilingual-open-tools-for-creation-and-translation

Over the years, StoryWeaver has come to serve millions of users. Yet, the platform struggles with performance at scale as certain technologies in the overall architecture turn outdated. Partnerships with CBSE and Punjab Education Dept., saw a huge increase in daily traffic and a 100x spike in concurrent users creating stories. This underlined the need for updating our creation and access microservices to robustly serve users.
The World Economic Forum has predicted that 1.1 bn Indians will have access to the Internet by 2030, with 80% primarily using mobile devices and accessing language content. To reach the next generation of internet users, content creation and access must be designed to serve needs of the underserved communities, ensuring that new users are not just connected but empowered. To this effect, we have made structured investments into technical capacities to onboard communities, such as supporting Unicode for the Chakma language, enabling the Chakma community to write their first-ever story on StoryWeaver. Suchana, a community organization, created a unique multi-year program that took Santali children from their home language to the school language to English. StoryWeaver helped support bilingual formats and publishing of stories with 3 different scripts for Santali - Bengali, Olchikki & Devanagiri.
This grant will help StoryWeaver complete our technology migration and open-source our inclusively designed stack that allows for creation, translation, publishing and dissemination of content in 300+ languages. While StoryWeaver’s current pathways enable publishing under creative commons and innovations on access such as offline library via browser cache, the ecosystem can further contribute capabilities such as multi-license publishing and collaborative translations. With StoryWeaver as a continued steward, open-sourcing the stack will enable developers to create multilingual community platforms for use-cases beyond picture book creation.