To aid Haitians looking for aid online

Mar 22, 2010 16:33 GMT  ·  By

The Haiti earthquake may not be the hottest piece of news at the moment as the world has moved to the next headline grabbing tragedy, but for the people there the disaster is as fresh as always. Faced with the task of rebuilding an entire country, things aren't looking good in Haiti, already the poorest country in the region, even with all the outside help it's been getting.

Every little thing helps and, as Google notes, communications is very important in this troubling times and since traditional media is pretty much in shambles, the Internet has taken a central role. Acknowledging this, Google has now released a Kreyòl-language version of its homepage and search engine.

"The massive earthquake that recently stuck Haiti took a heavy toll on communication infrastructure (including TV, radio and newspapers). In the weeks following the earthquake, the Internet has become an important tool for Haitians to search for news and information," Christine Multidor, engineering recruiting coordinator wrote on behalf of the Internationalization Team.

"We previously added support for Haitian Kreyòl to Google Translate and we are happy that Google search can now be used the Haitian people in their native language.We would like to thank the Haitian volunteers who heard our call for volunteer translators and generously shared their time and knowledge to improve the search experience for all Haitians," she added.

This couldn't have been achieved without the help of Haitian volunteers who took up the challenge of translating the Google homepage on their own time and without receiving much in return. Haitian Kreyòl was already available in Google Translate, the company's translation service, which now supports quite a big number of languages.

Translation is increasingly important for Google and other web companies, notably Facebook, as it opens up the web to a much wider audience. The Internet seems an endless and boundless place, but the language barrier is as much of a problem online as it has been since the beginning of human civilization.