"Languages with a relatively small number of speakers, like Kochila Tharu, do not have enough digitized material for linguistic communities to thrive -- no Google Translate, no film or television subtitles, no online newspapers. In industry parlance, these languages are 'underserved' and 'underresourced.'"

"This is where StoryWeaver comes in. Founded by the Indian education nonprofit Pratham Books, StoryWeaver currently hosts more than 50,000 open-licensed stories across reading levels in more than 300 languages from around the world."

"Unlike most AI-powered commercial translation tools, interactive neural machine translation prediction technology (INMT) doesn't do away with a human intermediary altogether. Instead, it assists humans with hints in the language they're translating into." "Tools like INMT allow StoryWeaver's cadre of volunteers to generate translations of existing stories quickly."

An AI translation tool can help save dying languages. but at what cost?

#solidstatelife #ai #nlp #linguistics