Google’s giving away Android One phones if you help them translate

Google is taking the crowdsourcing route to fulfill its recent promise of making the internet more accessible to people who speak regional languages, asking users to help its new translation device by choosing appropriate English conversion to vernacular metaphors and euphemisms.

In a blog post to kick off their second Tranlatathon in India, the tech giant calls on participants to help Google translate Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam or Punjabi better by typing out the best-possible translation or selecting from a list. The company is also throwing in 50 Android One smartphones for the 50 most active contributors.

"Millions of people in India are coming online for the first time and most of them don't speak English. Bringing more Indian language content online, and improving Indian language translation quality, will help them have a better experience on the web," the post reads.

The move comes days after Google chief Sundar Pichai underlined the company's plans of introducing services like Tap to Translate -- instant translation of text to Indian languages as you type in any app-- and addition of regional language to speech recognition.

The previous Translatathon had 20,000 contributors that Google credits with improving the overall quality of Hindi content online by submitting over a million new translations in Hindi. The Translatathon is open till December 30.

Google has also been busy trying to beam internet -- unfiltered, unlike Facebook's Free Basics -- to unconnected Indians from balloons under Project Loon, providing free Wi-Fi at 400 railways stations and make public transport more convenient during the trial phase of the odd-even rule for private vehicles in Delhi.