International Mother Language Day is an observance held annually on 21 February worldwide to promote awareness of linguistic and cultural diversity and multilingualism. It was first announced by UNESCO on 17 November 1999.
No country would know the fun and importance of linguistic diversity more than India. So, at Pothi.com we decided to celebrate this diversity by running a translation drive.
If we want to preserve our mother tongue, it is important that our children are introduced to the language early on. So, we want you to translate a fairy tale into your mother tongue and release it under CC BY 3.0 license. Under this license others can use it and build on top of it. The tale we have chosen for this exercise is "The Golden Bird" from Grimm's Fairy Tales. You can download the English translation by Edgar Taylor and Marian Edwardes and submit your translation here.
Is this a Competition?
No! We do not really have the resources to judge the translations across the languages. The idea is to not organize a competition, but to increase awareness about our linguistic diversity. This is just an exercise, which we think people will participate in for the love of their language.
What happens to the translations submitted?
We will put them together in the form on an e-book available for free download from Pothi.com. If there are enough translations submitted and translators do not stump us off by using some exotic fonts and we do not face any major technical issues across languages, we will also try to bring a print book out of it. All the translators, whose tranlsation will be included can request a free copy to be shipped within India, if the print book comes out.
We will also put the individual translations up on our blog for people to access.
Deadline?
February 29, 2012
Who has the rights to the translated content?
This is very, very important. So, please read carefully before submitting your translation for the exercise. The translations submitted by you should be licensed under CC BY 3.0, whose human readable text is available here. The legal full license is here. So, please submit the translation only if you are willing to have this license for your translation.
The technicalities?
Please try to use a Unicode font for typing your translation. Tools like Google Transliteration can help you type in many Indian languages.
Queries?
Send an e-mail to events@pothi.com. However, please do not submit the translaiton via e-mail. We won't be able ot handle them. Use the submission form for submitting translation.