Faroe Translate

In 2017 the Faroe Islands launched Google Sheep View to get Google to come to the Faroe Islands. Via help from Google a year later Faroese sheep had covered both roads and paths with Sheep – Street View. This became one of the world’s best known campaigns and resulted in a massive increase of tourism to the Faroe Islands.

By solving one challenge the campaign created a new one. More than double the number of native Faroese citizens arrived at the eighteen small islands and obviously tourists don’t speak Faroese.  

Thus, tourists threatened the tiny language spoken by a mere 70,000 people in the world. But it turned out tourists would like to get to know a little of the local language when visiting Faroe Islands. Only, that’s impossible. For Google Translate doesn’t translate to and from Faroese. 

To solve this problem, the Faroese prime minister sent an open letter to Google asking them to add Faroese to Google Translate.

Google ignored the letter.

Yet again, we had to solve the problem for ourselves. We developed a copy of Google Translate with one significant difference. Instead of getting an auto generated text you get a film in which a Faroese volunteer translates what you wish for. The world’s first LIVE video translation system!

In a short while the story of the Faroe Islands versus Google made headlines in many of the world’s largest media.

Hereafter the constant stream of new translation films was shared online thus creating a cycle of new visitors asking for new translations, all shared again, and yet again generating new visitors, and so forth. A virtuous circle.