As Google continues to grow, it faces a mounting challenge. Where to find new content to search and index? Content apparently isn't coming in as fast as Google needs. So it took it upon itself to create new content as this article describes. Google started a contest at universities in East Africa to promote the translation of Wikipedia articles to Swahili, a language with very little content online but a potential 100 million strong user base.
Does it really have to take foreign firms enticing us with prizes for us to generate new content? Especially in Swahili. Bloggers in East Africa, similar to this blog, have started to create some of this content, however the quantity is minuscule. The question is how can we promote 'local' and 'original' content creation? Should local universities start promoting this? Will print media companies see this as a void that they can easily fill?
I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, so please leave your comments.
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This is very interesting, kind of reminds me of the on going debate for years now, about Kiswahili being the language used by teachers in secondary schools. I have seen how facebook have tried to have a kiswahili version, good idea if you ask me, but I wasnt very impressed with most of the translations. Although I speak kiswahili most of the words did seem foreign. I think the problem with all this is as follows. First, kiswhaili doesnt have enough vocabularies, especially technical words. Secondly, even if we translate every thing to kiswahili, some words will create more difficulties for the readers to understand, even for people who are fluent in kiswahili. I believe most of us will have to read these translated articles to kiswhaili with a kamusi (swahili dictionary) on the side. In conclusion, I think this will be a great move, it will help swahili grow, expand, also reate jobs, only that it wont be easy in the beginning. Kiswahili is not as easy as we all tend to think, because written and spoken are not all the same thing....but am for the idea.
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