Translator Gator is an app-based game which engages the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ in developing dictionaries or taxonomies to support academic research and social projects in Indonesia. It is currently being applied to develop a dictionary of key terms connected to the Sustainable Development Goals for six local languages: Bahasa Indonesia (including Gaul and Alay), Jawa, Sunda, Minang, Bugis, and Melayu. In doing so, the game is also raising awareness about the the Sustainable Development Goals in Indonesia.
More broadly, Indonesia has rich digital sources of citizen feedback, such as official channels or social media, but the hundreds of local languages in Indonesia complicate research in this area as words, context and, by extension, meaning change from region to region. On social media, such variations – including jargon – make building a list of keywords for digital text analysis more challenging.
The project is testing the effectiveness of crowdsourcing for developing dictionaries of key terms in Indonesian and other local languages. The translated keywords would be applicable to many projects, especially those related to digital text analysis and will be published following the conclusion of the project.
