IIIT is slowly clearing any doubts that its name is a typographical error. Hyderabad’s International Institute of Information Technology is working on software that will make computers translate English into several Indian languages.
Language translation, especially English to Oriental tongues, is regarded as one of the biggest software challenges because of the complexity in grammar and syntax. Translating something as apparently simple as "I plant a bomb near the plants at the steel plant" can tie a computer in knots.
The Shakti translation software from IIIT is powerful enough to tackle this problem. Any English sentence fed in is smartly translated by an elaborate algorithm into Hindi. Rajeev Sangal, IIIT director, is an old hand at translations. For the last 20 years, he has been seeking ways of translating English into Indian languages. Shakti has been fed over two lakh English and 30,000 Hindi words. The dictionary publishers asked Sangal money for the content, like Rs 20 lakh to source a thesaurus. Sangal circumvented the problem by raising an army of school children across India, who typed in a few English words each and sent them to him. Editors sat for days and stitched it all together.
Once a month Shakti goes to war, appropriately with Shiva, another translation software developed by a combined strength of Carnegie Mellon University, IISCc Bangalore and IIIT itself. While Shakti is ‘taught’ grammar by physical inputs of words and nuances of languages, Shiva compares various sets of translations and applies a standard logic to all prose. The battle is a passionate affair at the IIIT. Impartial judges are sourced from the industry to decide the winner, but, "Shakti always wins", says a gleefully parochial Sangal.
IIIT is also working on converting text files in Indian languages into voice, and transforming scanned images of Indian language copy into something that the computer would understand as editable prose. They are all heading towards a day when it will be possible for an illiterate Indian to borrow Gone With the Wind for reasons best known to him, have it scanned, translated into an Indian language and read out to him by a PC. The Shakti translation software is the crucial link in this chain of events. "English matters to about a billion people in this world," Sangal says. The remaining five billion, he says, need Shakti.
