Headline in bdnews24.com:

“Bangladesh adds 700,000 words to Google Translate in a day” (3/28/15)

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.

This huge number of Bengali words added to Google Translate raises a lot of questions.  If 700,000 words were added in a single day, one wonders what the total number of words are in Bengali.  (English has a particularly large vocabulary, but it is only somewhere between a quarter of a million and three quarters of a million words.)

What were the criteria for selection?

How did they avoid duplicates?

What is the total vocabulary of Bengali?  (Volunteers had already added over 65,000 words on February 21.

Will Google Translate accept all 800,000 or so entries keyed in by volunteers?  Wikipedia has stringent procedures for changes that are made to its articles.  How will Google Translate maintain quality?

Read the full article in Language Log here: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=18469

Related Translation News post:

• Bangladeshis race against time to add 400,000 Bangla words to Google Translate

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