Swahili News, Insight, Onboarding

This project proposes to make our library of Cardano educational content available in Swahili. These translated resources will include both written and audio versions of **beginner-friendly** Cardano news, insight, and community resources.

We have established relationships with Swahili translators, and are ready to jump into the work of translation. We are collaborating with a collective of young college grads in Kenya who are starting their careers as technology and journalism professionals. These young people are all native Swahili speakers, educated in English-speaking post-secondary institutions in technical fields. Our translation project is a perfect way to introduce these young African professionals to blockchain concepts, establish grass-roots awareness of Cardano in Kenya, provide resources in the local language, and pave the way for future adoption and development of Cardano by and for African people.

We have a trained linguist and teacher on our team to provide strategic leadership.

Our current website covers Cardano network basics, onboarding paths, news, and insight articles. We invite community involvement by providing an interface to submit new content, comment and respond to existing content, record audio versions of articles, and propose new article ideas. We publish new content weekly, covering breaking news, and Cardano insights, geared toward newcomers and nontechnical audiences. We have 20 articles and pages to translate immediately, and expect to roughly double that number in the next six months. This project would fund the translation of existing and new content for the next six months.

Our website already supports multi-language, including:

• Detecting User's preferred language, and presenting content in that language if available.
• Allow users to toggle between available languages.
• Some content is already available in translation. This project will allow us to continue and expand translated content.

The technical and relational framework built in this phase will allow us to continue translate content written in English as well as source original Swahili content. Language tags, Search Engine Optimization, and grass-roots marketing efforts will be leveraged to spread accessible Cardano resources to new audiences.

About Us

We are two Cardano enthusiasts. With our community of contributors, we provide hype-free, educational news and insight about the Cardano network that is accessible to everyone. Most online blockchain content is written by and for developers and finance geeks. We are building a network of contributors who break down complicated technical ideas for everyday people, and provide relevant news in quick bites.

Our website is a resource for anyone who wants to learn what Cardano is, why they should care, and how they can participate. We want to make these resources accessible to as many people as possible.

Darlington is an engineer by day and at all times a dancer, humanitarian, idealist and entrepreneur.

Stephanie is a teacher and technologist with a passion for helping non-profits navigate and capitalize on technology.

Our Kenya team are recent college grads with backgrounds in technology, journalism, and business. This project is an onramp for them to get involved in Cardano, with an eye toward ongoing collaboration.

Motivation

We see that the next frontier of growth for Cardano won't be confined to Developer forums and GitHub repositories. Instead, it will be among our friends and neighbors, as they start to see and understand the applications of blockchain technology for their own lives and futures. We hope they will see Cardano as the most exciting project out there, and we want to provide a trusted resource to help them learn, get involved, and contribute.  

Our Values

We believe that Cardano is a powerful platform paving the way for a future that works for everyone. To help connect that future with "everyone", information and resources must be available to all kinds of people. So we put a high value on accessibility:

• Explain groundbreaking technology in simple terms
• Provide a User-Friendly interface and thoughtful resources
• Meet ADA standards for differently-abled users, including Audio versions of all content
• Provide our content in other languages, including Swahili as a key way to reach a large African demographic

How big is the market

Nearly 150 million people speak Swahili, making it one of the most useful languages to reach a number of African countries and populations. There's already a robust Cardano community in Tanzania where Swahili is the national language. But there is a need for resources written for everyday people in Swahili.

Definitions of Success

Translations of core website content available in Swahili (20 existing pages/articles in translation).

Swahili translations of new Cardano news and insight articles over the next 6 months (additional 20 pages/articles)

Translated Content is being viewed in native-Swahili speaking parts of the globe (as captured in Google Analytics)

Roadmap

1 Month Milestones: Website UI supports multi-languages, responsive language settings based on end-user language settings, toggling between languages, and participation by community translators. Establish relationships with Swahili translators, and begin gathering translated content.

3 month milestones: All core educational resources on the site is translated and available in Swahili, and a cadence has been established for translating new content (ongoing news, insight, and community-submitted articles)

6 month milestones: Full library of 6 months of new and existing Cardano content is available in Swahili.

Future: Ongoing Spanish content beyond this launch phase can be sponsored by Cardano Community Support and Stake Pool Rewards. Cultivating relationships with our Kenyan team for locally sourced content by and for Swahili speakers. 

Budget

$2,500 Translation of 20 existing news, insight and Cardano onboarding articles for beginners. Paying 125/article for written translation.

$2,500 Ongoing translation of 1-2 new articles per week plus other site content in the next 6 months. Article average length is between 500-1000 words, other site content includes additional resources and links for people to learn about Cardano, changing and growing on an ongoing basis.

$1,500 Audio recordings of site content in target language, making resources accessible to more people. This amount allows us to record existing 20 articles, plus new content for the next 6 months.

$1200 Developer Cost to continue the buildout and maintenance of multi-language support. Darlington has donated ~60 hours to build a basic framework for multi-language content. This amount will allow him to spend the time needed to enhance and support the back end of our multi-language content at a discounted rate.

$500 Administrative cost to hire, coordinate, and support translation resources.