Sampark makes translation from one Indian language to another easy

Syed Akbar

Hyderabad, Aug 15: Translation from one Indian language to another is now just a click-of-mouse away, thanks to a machine translation system, Sampark, developed by the city-based International Institute of Information Technology.

The machine translation system is devised to translate Indian languages online. The system will be available for public use in September.

Using Sampark tools one can translate scripts in as many as 18 Indian languages from English and vice versa. Initially, the system will support only six languages and the second phase will include another 12 languages.

According to Prof Rajiv Sangal, director IIIT-Hyderabad, Sampark developed by a consortium of 11 institutions led by IIIT offers translation of Indian languages unlike Google which focuses mainly on English.

MT tools are upcoming areas of study in the field of computational linguistics. Machine translation is the application of computers to the translation of texts from one natural language into another, he said.

One needs to just copy the text one wants to translate and paste in the box provided in the Sampark system. It can also translate entire web page with pictures and graphics intact.

The content available over the web, largely in English will be automatically translated to the Indian languages. This work involves machine translation from English to Indian languages.

Providing affordable and effective education for a large number of students, in geographically distributed locations is being attempted. This has emerged as a new necessity in the networked environment. Work is done on the effective use of information technology tools for this. IT tools can also be effectively used to make primary education available in rural Indian communities in their own languages.