Translating Wikipedia to the language of the Maya

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Yucatec Maya is spoken daily by nearly 700,000 people in southern Mexico. It’s a living language, descendent of the civilization of antiquity, which has lasted for centuries and now sees a growing artistic production. It is also used in daily speech among the Spanish-speaking Mexicans who live in the states of YucatánCampeche and Quintana Roo.

Translatón attendees
Translatón attendees

Among the younger bilingual speakers (Mayan/Spanish), there is a growing interest in using digital tools in their mother tongue. Therefore Nacnati (an NGO formed by digital enthusiasts under the age of 30), the Mozilla Mexico chapter, Wikimedia México and the National Commission for Development of Indigenous Peoples of the government of Mexico held a Mayan Translatón (translate-a-thon) in Merida, Yucatan, commemorating the International Day of Indigenous Peoples on August 9th. Among the group of 31 translators were anthropologists, lawyers, researchers, graduate students in Maya and even high school students from nearby boroughs, such as Peto, Tekax, Valladolid, Halachó and Muna.
During the Translatón, which occurred from 8 am to 6 pm, participants localized Mozilla Firefox, increased the articles on Yucatec Mayan Wikipedia — which is still at Wikimedia Incubator — and uploaded the first documents of the Google Endangered Languages project.
With this event we began a very important activity for new and current generations of our Mayan communities. Articles have been added to Wikipedia; the Firefox browser in Maya will now be published sooner; and Maya linguists are uploading documents to the Google Endangered Languages project​​. But the highlight of the Mayan Translatón is that 31 mayan language advocates are committed to follow this initiative and repeat this activity for the next event.
Ko’one’ex! (or “Hooray!” in Maya)

Ivan Martinez and Julio Gómez Sánchez, Wikimedia México
Translation to Maya by Vicente Canché Moo.

Archive notice: This is an archived post from blog.wikimedia.org, which operated under different editorial and content guidelines than Diff.

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Hi,
I’m one of the Wikimedia Incubator admins and we noticed the sudden activity on the Yucatec Maya Wikipedia. If you have any questions or problems, or if you can give us feedback on the usability of Incubator, feel free to contact us on the Community Portal [1] or in the IRC channel #wikimedia-incubator. We look forward to a following event with more activity 🙂
Also, if you are interested in localising the MediaWiki software, you are encouraged to do so on https://translatewiki.net because Yucatec Maya is still at 0%.
[1] https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Incubator:Community_Portal

Interesting, what are those “documents to the Google Endangered Languages project​​”?
For the stats addicts, 8 new articles were created, each with about 1 kB of text.