KRG Culture Minister awards man who added Sorani Kurdish to Google Translate

The Minister of Culture and Youth of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), Hamay Hama Saeed congratulated Bokan Hassan Jaff, the young man from Halabja who added the Sorani Kurdish dialect to Google Translate.

The Minister of Culture and Youth congratulated Hassan in a phone call and told him that they will award him in a worthy ceremony.

"If our nation preserved our language with cultural and Peshmerga struggles in the past, today in the era of technological development, you and your colleagues have taken this step... your work is commendable and appreciated," Culture Minister told Hassan, reiterating his support to him.

Bokan Hassan was born in 1991 in Halabja. He studied English at the University of Garmian-College of Education. He graduated in 2014.

For 7 years, Hassan collected and used more than one and a half million pieces of data to add the Sorani Kurdish dialect to the translator.

"The struggles and sacrifices of the Kurdish nation helped us convince the company to add the language," he said.

The Slemani Governorate administration congratulated and thanked Hassan for his achievement, saying that what has helped in preserving the Kurdish nation is their language. 

In a post on Facebook, the Consulate General of the United States also congratulated Hassan and speakers of the dialect.

"Google just announced adding the Sorani Dialect of the Kurdish language to Google Translate. We warmly congratulate the speakers of the Sorani Dialect and the wider community in IKR and around the world on this special occasion," the consulate said.

"We’d also like to especially congratulate Bokan Jaff, a young man from Halabja and one of the key collaborators on this project, for his dedication and hard work in bringing about this important milestone for the Kurdish language on the world stage," it added. "In his March visit to Halabja, CG Palladino met Bokan, and he briefed the CG on his efforts, this event at Google, and expressed his gratitude to the U.S. Consulate General in Erbil for helping him connect with engineers at Google Translate. And well done to the other hard-working collaborators who worked on the project! What’s the first thing you will try to have Google Translate translate to/from Kurdish for you?" 

Hassa is also the founder of the Google Crowdsource in Iraq and the Kurdistan Region. Crowdsource is a crowdsourcing platform developed by Google intended to improve a host of Google services through the user-facing training of different algorithms. Crowdsource was released for the Android operating system on the Google Play store on August 29, 2016, and is also available on the web.

It is noteworthy that there are two main Kurdish dialects (Kurmanji and Sorani), as well as some peripheral ones (e.g. Pahlewani, Zazaki, and Hewrami /Gorani). 



PUKmedia