Kalam Launches Language Translation Software
A system that facilitates
translation of languages on the internet was launched by Former President
A.P.J Abdul Kalam.
The Machine Translation (MT) system developed by 17 institutions including the International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT)
was released at the 20th International World Wide Web conference.
According to Rajeev Sangal, Director, IIIT Hyderabad, the MT System was based on
the Computational Paninian Grammar (CPG), which works very well for free word order
languages and Indian languages in particular.
He said the tools are available in three modules - Sampark (Indian to Indian), AnglaMT
(English to Bengali, Malayalam, Punjabi and Urdu) and Anvadaksh (English to Hindi,
Bengali, Marathi, Oriya, Urdu and Tamil)
"India has more than 122 languages of which 22 are designated as official languages.
More than a Billion people worldwide speak the following Indian languages - Hindi,
Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil and Urdu. With the availability of e-content and
development of language technology, it has become possible to overcome the language
barrier," Sangal told after the system was formally launched.
He said three consortia comprising 17 academic and research institutions were involved
in building 26 different pairs of languages.
"Right now, 12 pairs are available and the plan is to release more pairs every three-four
months," he said.
"Rs. 13 Crore went into the whole exercise and about 200 students were directly
involved in the development of these tools. An additional 200 students worked on
the project as a thesis and their algorithms were embedded into the systems directly,"
Sangal said.
Courtesy: Silicon India