This week, Google’s philanthropic arm (Google.org) announced an initiative called Health Speaks, which seeks to make health-related information available to individuals throughout the world, regardless of language. Starting with Arabic, Hindi, and Swahili, the project will use community, crowdsourced, and collaborative translation to address an important but often-overlooked disparity – access to health information.

Here’s how the project works:

• Volunteers will translate health articles. For its pilot project, Google has elected to have volunteers translate Wikipedia articles covering a variety of health care topics. Individuals will not be paid for their volunteer translation work, and must use Google Translator Toolkit.
• Google will donate to health care non-profits. For each word translated from English during the first 60 days of the project, Google will donate US$0.03 to one of three non-profit organizations – the Children’s Cancer Hospital Egypt, the Public Health Foundation of India, and the African Medical and Research Foundation, up to a total of US$150,000.
• Language barriers will be (partially) addressed. The initial project is only a pilot, but Google has made it clear that the long-term goal is to reduce the barrier to knowledge-based health care in nations with limited access to health information.

See: Global Watchtower™

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