With no Faroese on Google Translate, residents of the Faroe Islands have created a community-led service to help visitors decipher the local lingo
Google Translate allows users to translate words and phrases between more than 100 languages. But Faroese, spoken by some 80,000 people worldwide, is not one of them, a fact that has irked some of the 50,000 residents of the Faroe Islands.
They believe it could be discouraging visitors.In response, those living on the 18-island archipelago in the North Atlantic have taken on the tech giant by setting up their own online translation service: Faroe Islands Translate. The service is free and aimed at visitors to the islands, or anyone curious to learn their language.
Users of Faroe Islands Translate can type words or phrases in one of 14 different languages into the site’s search box and a video translation will be sent back in Faroese. During the first 24 hours of its operation, the most translated word was ‘love’.
Good journalism can be about good things too.
It is only possible due to the help of local volunteers – native speakers who will be on hand to respond translation requests using the video function on their phones.
The translators come from all walks of life, so users could be interacting with anyone from sheep farmers to social workers and chefs, to students such as Lisa í Dali, whose favourite Faroese phrase is “um tær ikki dámar veðrið, bíða so bara í 5 minuttir”, meaning “if you don’t like the weather, just wait five minutes”, a nod to the infamously changeable weather conditions in that part of the world.
Those behind the project say that tourism is growing in the Faroes, and noticed that not being included on Google Translate…
The post Ignored by Google, Faroese islanders set up their own online ‘translate’ service appeared first on FeedBox.