Languages of Vietnam in Bloom

Bloom
1

Hi there,

I’d like to use Bloom in a large education project in Viet Nam with the Ministry of Education and Training. However, none of the languages used in VN that also have orthographies are available in the list of 95 languages. Is there a way to add additional languages?

Thanks,

Valerie

2

Hi Valerie,

Bloom offers all of the languages in the ISO 639-3, i.e. those in the Ethnologue. I count 110 languages when I enter “viet nam”. in the Language Chooser. If you can tell us what languages you need that are missing, we can make inquiries for why they would not be in the Ethnologue, or if there’s a bug, or whatever.

Technically, yes, you can use unregistered languages. Click on the link labelled “Can’t find your language?”.

3

Ah, sorry @ValerieRose. It later occurred to me what happened. The 95 languages you refer to must be what you see on BloomLibrary.org; those are just the languages of books that have been submitted to the BloomLibrary. This is a small fraction of the actual languages that Bloom has been used for, since many projects don’t think to share their books in this way (but they should!). Bloom itself is a desktop application that contains the full list of 7,097 registered living languages.

We’d love to hear more about the plans in Vietnam and to answer any more questions you might have.

John

4

Hi John,

Thanks so much for the quick response! Yes, you’ve hit the nail on the
head. Thanks for the help.

So, here in VN, I am working on an ADB lower secondary education project
for so-called “disadvantaged” provinces, that have high numbers of students
from non-Kinh (majority group) backgrounds. I am working on school library
development and we want Bloom (and possibly StoryWeaver, although it
currently only has Vietnamese and Khmer) to be featured in our school
librarians’ and teachers’ professional development workshops and we will be
requiring librarians to develop a plan for how they will use Bloom to
produce new books, translate existing Bloom books, add existing books here
in VN that have been produced in several EM languages, and upload all to
the Bloom library. We also collaborate with the Library Department of the
Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, which is responsible for
implementing the culture of reading and the lifelong learning directives
from the prime minister. We will make sure that public library librarians
are included in our education workshops and also encouraged to produce,
translate and upload.

There are 1,500 school librarians in our project schools plus around 30,000
teachers, so we’re looking at a fair amount of materials!

I have a few other questions for you, if you don’t mind:

  1. The promotional and instructional videos are in English. To make them
    useful for our librarians and teachers, it would be great to have them in
    Vietnamese. Is it possible to do a voice-over? Or to add captions in
    Vietnamese? Or to get permission to mute the English and record in
    Vietnamese?
  2. Would you classify any of the Bloom library titles as any of the
    following genres: fantasy, traditional folklore, contemporary realistic
    fiction, historical fiction, science fiction, information books,
    biographies (including memoirs, diaries, auto- and second person accounts)?
    Or are the books too short to represent different genres and the text
    conventions specific to the given genre?
  3. We are very interested in being diversity-/inclusion-sensitive re
    mirror books (books where readers see themselves) and window books (books
    that allow the reader to look into a different kind of life/character than
    their own) and sensitivity to gender-sensitivity, disability-sensitivity,
    etc. I didn’t see that there is any way to select for
    diversity-/inclusion-sensitive keywords/markers. Does that possibility
    exist and I missed it?
  4. Last, I need to look and see if it’s possible to get the books in the
    library in an accessible format or if it’s possible to convert new books
    into an accessible format for readers with print disabilities,
    particularly. Sign language will be a challenge.

Any help is appreciated.

All the very best,

Valerie

5

Hi Valerie. I’m probably the best one for you to connect with. (And you know how to get me by email.)

The instructional videos on SIL LEAD’s YouTube page can be translated on the site. We have the process down for subtitles. Voice-over we haven’t done yet, but it would be interesting to explore that.

The topics you see on the bloomlibrary.org/browse are the only topics to search by.

We don’t currently have any topics identified in the SEL arena but have talked about it.

We are hoping to get funding to do both accessible books with audio and also video for sign languages, but neither has been implemented yet. Bloom does record audio and export as EPUB. That’s available now for those with poor vision.

6

Hi Paul,

I hope you’re well. Thanks so much for the information. I’ll share it with
my colleagues.

All the best,

Val

7

You’re welcome.

Paul

Paul S. Frank, PhD
Executive Director
SIL LEAD, Inc.
c/o WeWork
1440 G St NW
Washington DC 20005
Office: 972-460-6040
Cell: 214-596-8305