IIIT Launches Machine Translation System

Machine translation (MT) system, which facilitates web-based language translation and is developed by 17 institutions including the International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), was launched by former President APJ Abdul Kalam at the 20th International World Wide Web conference being held here. According to Rajeev Sangal, director, IIIT Hyderabad, the MT System was developed 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 reporters 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 from now," he said. "An amount of Rs 13 crore went into the whole exercise and about 200 students were directly involved in the developlent 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.