Engineering texts may soon be in Hindi, other languages, too

Project Udaan was launched virtually on Tuesday on the occasion of Hindi Day

Engineering textbooks and learning material might soon be available in regional languages, thanks to an Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)-Bombay professor, who has developed an artificial intelligence (AI)-based translation software - Project Udaan. This will enable translation of scientific and technical content from English to Hindi and other regional languages in one-sixth the time a team of domain and linguistic experts working manually would do.

Scientific and technical knowledge, which is largely available in English, has been difficult for those to understand who are not fluent in the language. In fact, many students in India who complete their schooling in vernacular mediums often find their engineering courses difficult due to the language barrier. Professor Ganesh Ramakrishnan, Institute Chair Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT-B and his team had started on the project seven years back to address a similar challenge.

Professor Ganesh Ramakrishnan, Institute Chair Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT-B

"Our approach to machine translation is that it will be aided by human effort. We started building lexicons of various technical domains. Here we faced the challenge of digitising the bilingual dictionaries and glossaries produced by CSTT. We developed very robust bilingual OCR technology and several post-editing tools through which we now have access to digital bilingual dictionaries in machine-readable format. We are therefore able to use the appropriate scientific and technical terms available in Hindi instead of just translating the English terms. We are happy to state that by deploying our AI-based translation engine, we are now able to translate a technical book in less than one-sixth the time it would take a team of domain and linguistic experts working manually," said Professor Ramakrishanan.

Project Udaan was launched virtually on Tuesday on the occasion of Hindi Day in the presence of Dr. Krishnaswamy Vijay Raghavan, Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India as the chief guest. The team aims to continue its work on Project Udaan, and complete its target of translating 500 engineering texts to Hindi in a year and in 15 Indian languages in three years.