Young Translators

Young Translators is an initiative from EETHAL Foundation in which teenagers of Tamil origin across North America work with adult volunteers to translate high quality educational and informational content from English to Tamil targeting youth in rural Tamil Nadu. Currently we translate TED videos and StoryWeaver stories into Tamil.

Why do we do this?

Many of us may be aware of the deficiencies in the educational system in other parts of the world, especially for students in rural underprivileged conditions.  But there are no dearth of talented and motivated students even in those areas who would flourish if only they could access world quality content such as Khan Academy on their own. Language is often a big barrier, so by making the content available in their native languages, we would like to enable those students to empower themselves to success.

Many of our teen volunteers are first generation immigrants from India growing up in USA but have strong roots to their mother tongue Tamil through family. They may have limited skills with it but they are socially conscious and motivated to help their counterparts in India living in a much less privileged conditions . We provide an opportunity to do that from the comfort of their homes while collaborating with like minded individuals online.

What we have done

We have grown from a small team of four students in the beginning of 2020 to about 100 teen and adult volunteers now (2023). Working with Vetrivel Founation, we translated 3rd grade through 7th grade Mathematics exercise materials in Khan Academy to Tamil. Since then we have moved on to other projects such as translating StoryWeaver stories, TED video subtitling as well as creating educational content for other NGOs such as Kalvi40.

How you can help

We are looking for volunteers of all ages and varying levels of Tamil skills. The opportunities include participating/assisting with online translation sessions, finding and fixing translation errors,  improving the quality of translations etc.

If you are a teenager with limited Tamil skills, volunteer via assisted online translation sessions conducted on a weekly basis.  Please read through some of the common questions about how this works. If you are an adult willing to help with any of other opportunities mentioned above, join as one of adult volunteers. Here are some details on how adult volunteers can help.