With the digital divide in India creating hurdles for citizens looking to register themselves for the COVID-19 vaccination, a team of hacktivists from the Free Software Movement of India has come up with a tool for web-browsers that can translate the CoWin website to regional languages. On Mozilla Firefox, users can now translate the website and its contents (cowin.gov.in), which is only available in English, into eight regional languages — Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Urdu, Hindi, Marathi and Odiya. In the coming days, FSMI plans to integrate the translation for 22 regional languages so that citizens all over the country can avail themselves of the facility. https://twitter.com/fsmi_in/status/1396406419172184073 A team of hacktivists from FSMI told MediaNama that the project took five days to develop. "Our volunteers at FSMI's branches in various States helped in the translation process," said one of the hacktivists on the condition of anonymity. They also have plans to include Santhali (tribal) languages and northeastern languages such as Khasi in the add-on. "We are developing this add-on to prove localization of COWIN portal can be done quickly and easily, along with disproving claims of the officials that it will take a long period of time to make it multi-lingual," the "About this extension" section of the browser 'Add On' said. The CoWin portal has been rife with errors since its inception and its functioning has exemplified the already-present digital divide in the country. These issues, coupled with the lack of vaccines in the country and a number of…
