An A.I. Translation Tool Can Help Save Dying Languages. But at What Cost?

Sanjib Chaudhary chanced upon StoryWeaver, a multilingual children's storytelling platform, while searching for books he could read to his 7-year-old daughter. Chaudhary's mother tongue is Kochila Tharu, a language with about 250,000 speakers in eastern Nepal. Languages with a relatively small number of speakers, like Kochila Tharu, do not have enough digitized material for linguistic communities to thrive--no Google Translate, no film or television subtitles, no online newspapers. In industry parlance, these languages are "underserved" and "underresourced." This is where StoryWeaver comes in.