UNESCO and NORAD join forces with partners to translate storybooks for Ukrainian children

Since the start of the war in Ukraine on 24 February 2022, it is estimated that more than half of the estimated child population of the country has been displaced. In addition, local authorities have reported that more than 733 educational institutions were damaged or destroyed.

To ensure the learning continuity of out-of-school children from Ukraine, UNESCO, in cooperation with the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad), the Global Digital Library, UNHCR, the EdTech Hub, the World Bank’s global EdTech team, H5P, Curious Learning, the Education Alliance, TV2 Skole and Elevkanalen, launched the Translate a Story Ukraine campaign. The Translate a Story Ukraine campaign is part of UNESCO’s support for Ukraine.

The Translate a Story Ukraine campaign has set out to translate at least 100 early-age digital books into Ukrainian. The translated books will be proofread and made available on the Global Digital Library (GDL) and local Ukrainian online platforms. They will be freely accessible through mobile phones, tablets and other mobile learning devices.

As of now, over 110 people have registered to join the campaign and 35 of them have started working on translations. So far, more than 80 books have been translated into Ukrainian and 70 of them have been proofread and published on the GDL platform.

If you are interested in participating in the campaign, you can register through the online form and indicate whether you would like to participate as a translator, proofreader or both.

The campaign is a continuation of UNESCO’s Translate a Story global initiative. The Translate a Story initiative was launched in April 2020 with the aim to provide children with early-grade reading resources in their mother tongue and facilitate home-based reading during COVID-19 school closures. UNESCO and Norad joined forces to launch government-driven translation of storybooks, and have been cooperating with Ministries of Education in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Kyrgyzstan, Palestine, Qatar, Uzbekistan and more recently in Ghana and Indonesia, to mobilize volunteers and translate books into local languages. Since April 2020, UNESCO supported the translation of over 1,100 books into 11 languages.