Server-based translation project begins

The department of information technology has initiated five mission mode projects to enable server-based machine translation facility for English to Indian languages and Indian language to Indian language.

Speaking on the sidelines of the release of the CDs containing software tools and fonts in seven languages for free distribution to the public, Telecommunications and IT Minister Dayanidhi Maran said: "With the help of the machine, a person speaking one language will be able to converse with a person knowing another language. We will develop an artificial intelligence technology that will enable speech to text machine translation and text to speech. In order to achieve this, the department has already initiated five mission mode projects where server-based machine translation facility is being developed."

Cross-lingual information access would be a browsing tool and optical character recognition and handwriting recognition were the tools that would be used for digital archiving such as in digital libraries and field surveys, he said.

For this, as many as 23 academic and research and development institutions and private corporates are already working in a consortium.The minister released the CDs here today.

containing software tools and fonts in Urdu, Punjabi, Marathi, Malayalam, Oriya, Kannada and Assamese languages here today.

Speaking on the occasion, Maran said the development and consolidation of the software tools and fonts for the remaining 12 official languages was in progress.

The minister said while Bangla and Gujarati software tools and fonts were expected to be released in the next three months, the remaining 9 languages would be done by the end of this year.

The CDs have been developed in cooperation with the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, an autonomous scientific society under the administrative control of the information technology department in partnership with a number of academia, research labs and private industries.

The CDs contain features such as true type fonts with keyboard driver, multi-font keyboard engine for true type fonts, unicode compliant open type fonts, unicode compliant keyboard driver, generic fonts code and storage code converter, localised version of BharateeyaOO, spellchecker, bilingual dictionary, transliteration tool and a language tutor package.