Mohammad Azhar Khan aka MAK

Software Engineer. Loves Python. Knows Python, Flask, Django, Node.js, serverless,AWS lambda and many more.


 Google Crowdsource Event at Poornima Foundation: Day 2 Review

09 Oct 2016 » google, Crowdsource, google maps

Google Crowdsource The Google Translate Community made their remarkable presence in Poornima Foundation on day 2 also, by connecting and interacting with a total of approx 2000+ enthusiastic students, conducting 4 joyous sessions. The day started with a brief introduction about translate community, a video for better understanding and a few questions to make it more interactive like-

  • How many of you use Google every single day?
  • How many of you use translation every day, week or month?
  • How many of you ever tried to search content in indic languages and how do you feel about the poor results you got?
  • Have you ever thought it would be easier if browsing was that much compatible in indic languages too?
  • Have you ever faced a language barrier in your very own country?

The students shared their experiences with the translate team, some of them were so true and made every one realize how important it is to have our languages preserved and shared as the team itself said that the whole internet is ruled by 10 major languages having more than 50% of the content in English only, and the ranking of Hindi lies far beyond (lesser than 0.5%) and of other indic languages is even lesser than that.


Then the team introduced the ‘Crowdsource’ app which can help Google to improve the contents in 5 major fields which are image transcription, handwriting recognition, translation, translation validation and map translation & validation. They also informed students about the 3 days competition ‘Translatethon’ which is going to be held from 9 - 11 October, in which the top contributors will get certified by team Google.


The team made students understand the necessity of translation by hearing some incidents from the audience side, some of the really interesting incidents were-

  • A south indian person asked a north Indian ‘where can he get a naai (kutta)’ and he directed him to a shop of naai (barber).
  • A student shared his experience of studying in a different state where someone offered him to eat ‘ganji’ (a dish) and he started thinking how can he eat ‘ganji’?
  • One of them shared how he sent his father messages in Hindi using translation while he was typing in English.

The experiences having different sentiments were like a rainbow with cultural and emotional touch. The representatives further handled queries of students, and they were-

Why should we contribute

We should contribute, not because we are earning some points of certificate; we should contribute to preserve our languages, to make communication more reliable. Ultimately by helping Google through crowdsource, is like helping ourselves.

How will you reach to the people seating in villages who don’t have much facilities

That is why we are joining hands to improve the content in hindi as well as other Indic languages so that the people in villages and the people in cities can be made equally compatible to communicate and enjoy the benefits.

Why is that the word-to-word translation through Google is very rich while strings and sentence translation is not satisfactory

Because like you students had yours teachers to make u understand the basics and grammatical rules of sentence formation whereas Google is a kid with no teacher, it only knows what you input so you need to help it understand your language better.

Why the Google Translate Community chose Poornima Foundation (PF) for the app launch while there are many more prestigious institutions in India

The major reason is that in talk journalism the student volunteers from PF interacted with Google team and asked to have some event in our campus too, after that the team did research over the institution and found the students most disciplined, enthusiastic and eager to learn so they found PF the best campus for their app launch.

How do you think it will enrich our culture

India has a different language in every 10 kms and each language has its rich literature, each region has its own cultural values, so we will be able to spread our literature and culture more powerfully in our own native languages.


The event ended with brief introduction of the products and facilities which Google offers for indic users like- Google Maps in Hindi, Indic Keyboard, Voice Search, Word-lengths, more accelerated search, new feature of Google which makes users to search simultaneously in 2 different tabs in English as well as Hindi.

The 2 days event was a grand success with 5000+ student audience and a number of experience sharing, leading to the thought of ‘unity in diversity’ and with a message that we should all join our hands to make our culture and our language more rich and more accessible.

Blog Credits:

Vimla