Published : Saturday, 14 July, 2018 at 4:18 PM, Count : 2322
Desk report : Bangladesh adds
700,000 words to Google Translate in a day.An official announcement from
Google Inc is yet to be made but State Minister for ICT Zunaid Ahmed Palak
broke the news in his Facebook post on Friday. He congratulated all involved in
the post. “We’ve done it! Our target was 400,000. Setting a record by adding so
many words in a day has taken Bangladesh
to a new high,” he said.
“Bengalis across the globe could add over 700,000 words and phrases to Google
Translate since yesterday, thanks to all who responded to our call. The credit
goes to all, the pride is of Bangladesh,”
he added.
Over 4,000 volunteers keyed in at least 400,000 words to the translation
app in a day from 81 places in the country .
The initiative, co-organised by the ICT Division, Google Developers Group and
Bangladesh Computer Council (BCC), kicked off on Thursday morning at Agargaon.
It ended at 6am on Friday.
It was said adding over 400,000 words in a day would set a record.
Palak said more people from homes worked for the record.
“It is an unofficial announcement of sorts. Google will formally announce the
number of words contributed and the record soon,” he said.
On Thursday, the state minister said the Google server had crashed twice after
11am on when about 10,000 users logged in simultaneously.
Google Translate is a free online language translation service that supports 90
languages, according to the company.
Anyone can add new words or phrases to it by going to
http://translate.google.com/community
As many as 65,000 Bangla words were added to Google Translate on Feb 21, the
second highest after Spanish on that day.