Team:IIT-Madras/TheLanguageProject
Overview
When our team members approached the public to talk about synthetic biology and our project we faced an unanticipated barrier. A good number of people were not only unaware of recent developments in the field that make synthetic biology possible; but also could not speak or understand the language, most scientific research is communicated in: English.
India is a diverse country with 22 official languages and only 12.18% of the people understand English (2001 census). Synthetic biology is a recent and unique field that can invite several ethical questions and therefore public engagement is of the essence. For effective public involvement, we need the audience to understand the science behind synthetic biology. Hence we decided to design an introductory course on the basics of SynBio in several Indian languages.
The graph doesn't depict anything under English Speakers because the number of first language English residents is 2,00,000 or 200,000; too few to be depicted on a million-to-one scale.
Source: Indian Census, Ministry of Home Affairs, Govt. of India
But the need for a Language Project ran much deeper, as we soon realised. Science in general- and biology in particular- are relevant to every person. The inquiry of how life came to be and our quest to understand and deal with its elegant complexity must be inclusive and universal. India is a vast country that has never shown a dearth of brilliance and potential. However, most of the times, its inhabitants just...happen to not speak or be comfortable with English. This introductory course on synthetic biology (originally in 9 major languages spoken in India) aimed at lay people of all age groups and all walks of life, is our humble contribution to the ever-growing revolution of bringing science to all.
The languages we’ve made content available on so far are
Bengali,
English,
Gujarati,
Hindi,
Kannada,
Malayalam,
Marathi,
Tamil and
Telugu.
We believed that we could make a significant impact by generating content in vernacular languages, hence began the journey of the Language Project. We decided to make videos. Our enthusiastic team members started with off making hand-drawn images of diagrams, then we made audio clips and finally stitched these together to make the videos. After multiple edits and drafts, gaining valuable feedback along the way we decided to release our videos on YouTube. Since then Language Project has taken off. We began with 9 Indian Vernacular languages, now we have content in 26 different languages collaborating with 13 other iGEM teams for 11 foreign languages. Our goal is to make the general public aware of basic ideas of genetics and synthetic biology and hopefully generate enough interest to make people excited about the prospects of science. This we believe will promote fruitful discussion between educators, researchers and stakeholders.