Introduction to World Mother Language Day

World Mother Language Day, observed on February 21st each year, commemorates the 1952 language movement in Bangladesh, a testament to the enduring significance of linguistic diversity. This day celebrates the pivotal role of mother languages in preserving cultural heritage, fostering inclusivity, and advancing development efforts worldwide.

Why is the Mother Language important?

The impact of a mother language in the development sector can be profound and multifaceted. Here are several ways in which it can influence development efforts:

1. Communication and Participation: Using a mother language facilitates effective communication between development practitioners and the local communities they serve. When people can express themselves in their native language, they are more likely to actively engage in development initiatives, share their insights, needs, and concerns, and participate meaningfully in decision-making processes.

2. Access to Information: Providing development materials, resources, and information in the mother language ensures that they are accessible and comprehensible to the target audience. 

3. Respecting Culture and Identity: Language is deeply intertwined with culture and identity. By promoting the use of the mother language in development efforts, there is a greater likelihood of respecting the identities and reducing barriers of adoption. 

4. Education and Literacy: Using the mother language as a medium of instruction in schools enhances learning outcomes, as students can more easily grasp complex concepts and engage in critical thinking when taught in a language they understand fluently.

5. Empowerment and Inclusivity: Emphasising the mother language in development projects fosters a sense of inclusion and belonging, which is essential for building trust and collaboration between development practitioners and community members.

6. Effective Implementation of Policies and Programs: Development policies and programs are more likely to succeed when they are tailored to the linguistic and cultural context of the target population. Incorporating the mother language into policy formulation, program design, and implementation ensures that initiatives are relevant, effective, and sustainable over the long term.

7. Economic Development and Market Access: In regions where the mother language is predominant, facilitating business transactions, market access, and entrepreneurship in the local language can boost economic development. It lowers barriers to entry for small businesses, improves customer engagement, and promotes economic inclusion by enabling broader participation in the market.

Overall, recognising and leveraging the importance of the mother language in the development sector can lead to more inclusive, sustainable, and culturally sensitive approaches to fostering positive change within communities. However there are challenges in leveraging technology to personalise content in regional languages. Let’s dive into the nuances of spoken and written forms of a language that bring in such challenges.

How Technology is the solution and challenge for multilingual solutions

Personalising content to users in their mother tongue within technology platforms presents several challenges, including:

1. Language Diversity: Dialects, scripts, and language families can vary in the same region. a) Dialectal Variations: Users speaking the same language may use different dialects or regional variations, such as British English vs. American English, b) Script Variations: Languages like Arabic may have different scripts (e.g., Arabic script vs. Latin script), adding complexity to content personalisation, c) Language Families: Within the Spanish language, variations exist between European Spanish, Latin American Spanish, and regional dialects, requiring tailored content.

2. Data Availability:  Collecting sufficient training data for machine learning models in languages with fewer speakers, such as indigenous languages, can be challenging due to limited resources and linguistic documentation.

3. Translation Quality: Machine translation tools may struggle to translate idiomatic expressions or cultural nuances accurately, leading to misunderstandings or inappropriate content personalisation.

4. Cultural Sensitivity: Personalised content may inadvertently use culturally insensitive language or imagery, causing offence or alienation among users.

5. Resource Intensiveness: Developing and maintaining personalised content in multiple languages requires significant investments in human translators, localisation specialists, and technology infrastructure.

6. Content Relevance:  Personalised recommendations may fail to resonate with users if they do not consider cultural context or local preferences, leading to low engagement and user dissatisfaction.

7. Privacy Concerns:  Users may be reluctant to share personal data, including language preferences, due to concerns about data privacy and security breaches, impacting the effectiveness of content personalisation efforts.

Other challenges include Algorithm Bias, User Engagement and Technical Infrastructure. Based on usage, algorithms inadvertently favour certain languages over others. Users may be uncomfortable with content in their mother language, and real-time language processing can be complex and expensive.

Addressing these challenges requires a comprehensive approach that involves leveraging advanced technologies, incorporating human oversight and cultural expertise, and prioritising user privacy and inclusivity in developing and implementing personalised content strategies. 

Significant strides have been made towards solving some of the challenges above. We have dived into a few significant partnerships with Glific that have taken up the challenge head-on.

Technology and Multilingual Solutions

Bhashini

At Bhashini, we understand the importance of personalising content to users’ mother languages, especially in the context of NGOs and the development sector. Powered by AI, our vision is to harness natural language technologies to enable a diverse ecosystem of contributors, partnering entities and citizens to transcend language barriers, thereby ensuring digital inclusion and digital empowerment in an Aatma Nirbhar Bharat (self-reliant India).

We have developed innovative solutions to empower NGOs to overcome the obstacles in linguistic personalisation and leverage the positive benefits of using the mother language in their work. Our platform utilises advanced natural language processing algorithms to analyse user preferences and linguistic patterns. Our platform at Bhashini prioritises user privacy and data security by implementing robust encryption protocols and stringent access controls.

We allow users to leverage voice as a medium to access information enabling NGOs to tailor content to the specific mother languages spoken by their target audience. Using Bhashini APIs, you can convert and translate speech to speech, speech to text, translation to translation and transliteration. Transliteration differs from translation in that transliteration focuses on representing the sounds of words, while translation focuses on conveying the meaning of words. Transliteration is often used when maintaining the original pronunciation of proper nouns, technical terms, or names, which is important, such as in scholarly texts, language learning materials, or multilingual data processing.  To implement these yourselves, visit our website.

In summary, Bhashini offers a comprehensive solution to personalisation challenges while harnessing the positive benefits of leveraging the mother language in the development sector.

Glific

With at least 33% of Indian population on WhatsApp with an 80%+ smartphone penetration according to one estimate, we should consider Whatsapp-based chatbots which can deliver content in the users’ mother tongue easily. Glific is one such WhatsApp chatbot that empowers NGOs to effectively communicate with end-users in their mother language through a user-friendly and customizable platform. With support for 15 languages at a time, NGOs can create rules to include dialects and regional variations and cater to diverse linguistic preferences. As shown above, Glific’s intuitive interface allows users from the NGOs to switch between languages seamlessly, ensuring end-users receive information in a language they understand best. Currently, most of the NGOs use, on average, three languages, with one using all 15 languages. 

Glific integrates easily with Bhashini, bringing all the benefits of Bhashini to the end users on WhatsApp. This means a user can voice note something in their mother tongue, query information from a knowledge base in English, and get a voice note back in their mother tongue.

To make the translation of chatbot conversation flow easy, Glific is fine-tuning a soon-to-be-released feature called AutoTranslate. If you create a chatbot conversation in English and have Punjabi, Kannada, and Tamil enabled as languages for your chatbot, by pressing a button, you can automatically translate it, export the translated text so you can easily review it and import the corrected text so that it’s very easy to generate multilingual content. This streamlines communication processes and enhances engagement with diverse communities, ultimately facilitating greater inclusivity and participation in development initiatives. With Glific, NGOs can bridge language barriers, promote cultural sensitivity, and maximise the impact of their outreach efforts.

With these three features, we look forward to contributing to the efforts to deliver content to the user in their mother tongue!

Jugalbandi

For the team at Jugalbandi.ai, the call is different – In the heart of India’s bustling migration patterns, where dreams and aspirations push individuals from states like Bihar, Jharkhand, Assam, Odisha, and West Bengal towards the neon lights of Bengaluru, Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Gurgaon, lies a challenge as old as time – the quest for belonging. For these migrant workers, the urban landscape is not just a maze of concrete but a labyrinth of linguistic and bureaucratic complexities. We have collaborated with Bandhu (about which you’ll read below) to bring this access to migrant workers. In this setting, Jugalbandi, powered by Bhashini, shines, transforming a WhatsApp message into a key that unlocks doors to affordable housing, not in a foreign language, but in the warm, familiar sounds of home. This tool does not stop at opening doors; it guides its users through the maze of legalities, turning the daunting task of documentation into a few simple steps over chat, all in the language they dream in.

Jugalbandi’s vision stretches far beyond the realms of housing. Imagine a farmer in a remote village, struggling to navigate the web of government schemes, each a lifeline to a better future. With Jugalbandi, this farmer no longer faces a wall of bureaucracy but finds a friendly guide in his pocket, speaking in his dialect, offering not just information but a pathway to apply and benefit from these schemes directly through a chat interface. This is empowerment in its truest form – breaking down the walls of red tape and bringing government support directly to the hands that toil the soil.

The corridors of justice, often silent and foreboding to those not versed in the language of the law, now echo with the voices of the common man. Jugalbandi, with its promise of inclusivity, extends its hand into the legal domain, translating the complex lexicon of legal processes into a multitude of India’s languages. It connects those entangled in legal dilemmas with advocates, making the first step towards justice not just a possibility but a reality for many. This is not just about legal aid; it’s about transforming the very essence of justice to be more accessible, understandable, and equitable. Try it out yourselves from their website!

Some Multilingual Solutions on the Ground

How Bandhu is using the mother tongue to improve livability and livelihood

Bandhu is a conversational AI-enabled tech platform that connects India’s 300 million blue-collar workers to urban jobs and affordable rental housing. These workers often find it challenging to learn to use technology solutions designed to help them, especially when these solutions are not translated into their native languages. 

Bandhu’s WhatsApp chatbot is enabled for over 12 major Indian languages, powered by Jugalbandi.ai, Microsoft Research, Glific, and Bhashini. A worker speaking any of these languages can send a simple voice note to the chatbot in their native tongue, and get back a text or voice response in the same language.

Bandhu is currently fine-tuning the chatbot’s responses for better accuracy across different languages. This feature is lowering the barrier to entry for a worker who may not yet trust technology, helping them to comfortably converse with the platform and consider it as their own personalised “bandhu” (friend). 

Bandhu has reached about 100,000 users throughout India and has logged 25,000 digital visits to the chatbot since its deployment. Bandhu’s efforts were recently featured by Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, as a use case for helping migrant workers access jobs and housing.

Bandhu’s community champions–often women migrants–list vacant spaces using Bandhu’s multilingual smartphone app. Migrants discover and apply for these spaces on Bandhu’s WhatsApp chatbot using voice notes or text messages in their mother languages.

How Reap Benefit it using the power of Bhashini to build communities and record their actions via their bot

Reap Benefit works with youth to solve local civic-environmental problems. Building this muscle is a huge challenge as solving local problems involves high friction and low acceptance. Surfacing their stories is important to both them and their acceptance in their local – and here, bridging the gap between language literacy and fluency becomes key. Their stories in English, as much as their mother tongue, allow others to discover what skills these problem solvers (called Solve Ninjas) are demonstrating and help them remember the consistent actions they are taking.

Leveraging Bhashini, we have explored if a voice note by the solve ninja in their local language can be routed to chatgpt via Jugalbandi to convert that voice note into a story which they can then read, approve and post on their Change Maker Portfolio.

Out of our 100,000+ users, the top 3 languages used are English, Punjabi, Hindi, followed by Kannada, Assamese, Tamil.  Solve Ninja A, a boy from a farming community from HD Kote region of Mysuru district, was amazed at how the Solve Ninja bot was able to take his voice note in Kannada and give him a well-written but accurate and authentic para to share on his change maker portfolio. Imagine what this is unlocking!

How Udhyam it using their bot to build entrepreneurial spirit

At Udhyam, they help young learners and micro-entrepreneurs actualize​ their highest desired possibility.  The approach to achieve Udhyam’s mission of #MakingBharatEntrepreneurial is by harnessing the innate entrepreneurial potential of India’s youth through a scientifically designed curriculum. The curriculum is experiential in nature and built around the learning principles of enabling student autonomy, learning by doing, and leveraging real world experiences as means of effective learning.They do this through state partnerships, contextualised curriculum, product interventions, and business capability trainings to enable entrepreneurial mindsets and behavioural changes.

Udhyam Chatbot which is used as a tool to enable student actions has a reach of 1,00,000 + users (students + teachers ). All the flows built on chatbot are designed in regional languages as well as English to encourage better engagement and learning experience.  Currently they have flows in 5 regional languages Punjabi, Hindi , Marathi , Telugu and Malayalam. Students and teachers have the autonomy to view the entire curriculum and weekly tasks in their regional language as well as make submissions too in their preferred language through the bot. Currently they have third party vendors that help them with translations and effective testing of these regional language flows indicating their conviction in the power of the mother tongue in unlocking the self belief needed to unlock the spirit of entrepreneurship. 

Sharing glimpses of their flows in regional languages

How Civis is using it to build people’s belief in their opinions on policy

Civis’s pioneering approach to engaging the public in policy feedback has underscored the critical importance of linguistic inclusivity in the democratic process. By deploying a bilingual chatbot for consultations on the Draft National Menstrual Hygiene Policy, Civis has illuminated a path toward a more inclusive policy-making environment. Remarkably, 27 out of the 65 feedback submissions were made in Hindi by individuals from 12 distinct cities, highlighting the significance of accommodating mother tongues in policy dialogues. This initiative ensures that diverse viewpoints contribute meaningfully to the shaping of policies that impact their lives directly.

Beyond linguistic inclusivity, Civis’s commitment to accessibility extends to its WCAG 3-compliant web platform, making it accessible to people with disabilities. This dedication to inclusivity is further exemplified by Civis’s efforts to make policy summaries available in 12+ Indian languages beyond just Hindi and English. Unlike mere translations of complete policy documents, these summaries distil the essence of policies into more digestible, accessible formats. This thoughtful approach broadens access and enhances public engagement by making complex policies understandable and relatable to a wider audience.

This endeavour isn’t just about making policy discussions accessible; it’s about enriching them with the diverse tapestry of voices that form the bedrock of our society. Civis’s work serves as a beacon as we move forward, illustrating how technology and empathy combined can bridge gaps, ensuring that every voice is heard and valued in the collective journey towards a more inclusive, equitable, and participatory governance.

Call to action

If you want to test the magic of multilingual content delivered on WhatsApp, reach out to us on our bot here. If you want any help on Bhashini or Jugalbandi, the teams are more than happy to help! Want to speak to any of our NGOs on how their users are benefitting from seeing content in their mother languages, let us know via the bot!