IIT Bombay launches project to translate books into Hindi

'Udaan,’ a donation-based project, is an end-to-end ecosystem, which translates scientific and technical content from English to Hindi and all other Indian languages.  

The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay today launched ‘Project Udaan’ on the occasion of Hindi Diwas. ‘Project Udaan,’ a donation-based project, is an end-to-end ecosystem, which translates scientific and technical content from English to Hindi and all other Indian languages.  

Prof Ganesh Ramakrishnan, Institute Chair Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Bombay, and his team have built an AI (Artificial Intelligence)-based translation ecosystem, which can help translate engineering textbooks and learning materials in one-sixth the time it would take for a team consisting of domain and linguistic experts working manually. In due course, text books in all domains can be taken up.  

‘Project Udaan’ team aims to translate 500 engineering texts into Hindi in one year 

Seven years ago, Prof Ganesh and his team decided to come up with ‘Project Udaan,’ owing to the wide gap they saw in the availability of technical knowledge in Hindi and other Indian languages. The evolution of Prof Ganesh and his team’s end-to-end translation ecosystem has happily coincided with the implementation of the New Education Policy based initiative to introduce higher education through Indian languages. Through donations, the team aims to continue its work on ‘Project Udaan,’ and complete its target to translate 500 engineering texts in Hindi in one year and in 15 Indian languages in three years. 

Prof Ganesh said, “Our approach to machine translation has been 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 have developed very robust bilingual OCR technology and several post-editing tools by 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 transliterating the English terms.” 

He said, “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 for a team consisting of domain and linguistic experts working manually. In due course, as our AI and ML engine learns with every page and every book being edited in each domain, we expect to achieve a much shorter turnaround time.” 

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