International Mother Tongue Day: Translate a little, Read a lot

Bengaluru: "Every child should have access to good quality reading material in their own language." And this was what Pratham Books' Weave-a-Story campaign, set out to do in the genre of children's stories on Sunday, which is also the International Mother Tongue Day.

The aforementioned quotation is taken from the words said by Suzanne Singh, who is the chairperson of the organization. Pratham Books started their journey around 11 years ago to introduce to the children from government schools, the joy of quality reading.

Pratham, which publishes in about 18 languages, launched StoryWeaver to provide the children with the opportunity to read, create, translate or download from the online platform.

Yamini Singh, from the department of Pratham Books, commented that the campaign wants more and more people to translate the plethora of stories in as many languages as possible. And until now the stories have been translated 113 times and in which 91 were in Indian languages like Mundari, Konkani, etc.

Purvi Shah, the Digital Projects division head told that over 2,000 stories were translated by the community. Adding that World Konkani Centre took up the Konkani segments while the volunteers from Sanskrit Bharati took up the Sanskrit ones.

Pratham had the desired effect by conducting workshops across the city; aiming to reach every last child. And the desired effect is that even educators are now using the contents.

To expand more, Pratham aspire to collaborate with other organizations in the near future to spread more literacy among the children.

They had already linked up with platforms like African Storybook Project, Bloom Library, and Worldread.(Inputs from agencies)