MIT-Haiti, Google team up to boost education in Kreyòl
Institute-led effort to create STEM lexicon is now available for global translation
In recent years, MIT scholars have helped develop a whole lexicon of science and math terms for use in Haiti’s Kreyòl language. Now a collaboration with Google is making those terms readily available to anyone — an important step in the expansion of Haitian Kreyòl for education purposes.
The new project, centered around the MIT-Haiti Initiative, has been launched as part of an enhancement to the Google Translate program. Now anyone using Google Translate can find an extensive set of Kreyòl terms, including recent coinages, in the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) disciplines.
“In the past five or six years, we’ve witnessed quite a paradigm shift in the way people in Haiti talk about and use Kreyòl,” says Michel DeGraff, a professor of linguistics at MIT and director of the MIT-Haiti Initiative. “Having Google Translate on board is going to be another source of intellectual, cultural, economic, and political capital for Kreyòl,” he notes, adding that the project will aid “anyone in the world now, if someone is interested in producing text in Kreyòl from any language.”
Read the full story at MIT News
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