India Cuts Its Own Language Barriers

With more than 122 languages in India with 22 of those being official languages, it was high time that a translation software was developed to allow for greater and more efficient communication within the country. At the recent 20th International World Wide Web Conference held in Hyderabad, India, a new translation tool was revealed to the world.The new machine translation system has tools which 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).

“More than a billion people all over the world speak either Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil or Urdu. With the availability of e-content and development of language technology, it is now possible to overcome the language barrier,” says Rajeev Sangal, director of IIIT-Hyderabad.