Inclusion in every language

What a year 2020 has been! kasahorow turned 15 in July and we took the opportunity to evaluate whether our mission of modernizing African languages had served us well.

The short answer is no.

What we realized is that our true mission is to promote inclusion through languages.

Over the years, users in our home market of Ghana gave us feedback that they wanted to learn English. We insisted that they would be better off learning Akan, Gbe, Gadangbe -- their own languages, but definitely not English.

2020 and the Black Lives Matter movement taught us that they were simply asking to be included in the amazing progress of the world. This progress only appeared to be available in English, and so they wanted to learn English. They used kasahorow to help them translate to and from English (our most popular dictionaries are bilingual English dictionaries).

2020 and the Covid-19 pandemic taught us that inclusion also means fairness. In order to ensure the long-term health of society, everyone must wear a mask and keep a safe distance. If we don't provide fair access to masks and information, people will not take the right precautions and the long-term health of society suffers. We as kasahorow must also employ a strategy of fairness, by ensuring equal access to our dictionaries and opportunities.

2020 taught us that everyone loves to be included. And so we are changing our mission to improving inclusion in every language of the world. Translation is how kasahorow improves inclusion.

So, we need you to help us by pointing out where we fall short. We have started by changing our compensation model to treat every language the same. We pay the same amount to translators for all languages, regardless of where they live in the world. To ensure fairness to kasahorow, we assign a monetary value according to the level of inclusion created. A translator therefore gets paid according to how much inclusion their translation creates for kasahorow users.

Is it working? It’s too early to tell, but the early signs are encouraging. We have seen higher engagement from everyone who works with kasahorow. We are all adjusting to the new mission and we’ll keep you updated as we go.

Let us know if you have any suggestions or questions by using the feedback box at the bottom of this page.

Thank you for your continued support of kasahorow.