TAMILISH
SPEAKERS and TRANSLATION MACHINE
Former President of India A.P.J.Abdul
Kalam on 30 th March 2011 launched in Hyderabad Sampark Machine Translation
systems for Indian languages. Sampark Translation machine can now translate
from Punjabi to Hindi, Hindi to Punjabi, Urdu to Hindi and Telugu to Tamil.
This was reported in page 10 of The Hindu dated April 3 of 2011 with pride
proclaiming basic version translates 4 Indian language pairs. Though happy
about the technological progress I am also sad that my mother tongue Tamil is
lacking behind in this innovation in spite of Tamils far ahead of others in
Information Technology. May be they were busy in looking for good pastures
abroad to satiate their desires to earn more and more and forgot Tamil for a moment.
Or those Tamils left the burden to develop Tamil on the shoulders of Eelam
Tamils. We only speak Tamilish and with English in our lips we block Tamil
spring from our brain, by saying so these Tamils may excuse themselves from
their inborn duty to develop Tamil.
Director of the International
Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad which accomplished this remarkable
invention under Technology Development for Indian Languages programme of the
Department of Information Technology till now headed by a Tamilian and DMK
Minister A.Raja. A real DMK leader would have seen that Tamil achieves this
feat in first place, alas another opportunity lost to Tamil when our
representative was busy with money machines forgetting to develop translation
machine for Tamil. As consolation to Tamils, the newspaper reports that within
a year Tamil-Hindi, Telugu-Hindi, Hindi-Urdu, Kannada-Hindi, Punjabi-Hindi,
Marathi-Hindi, Bengali-Hindi, Tamil-Telugu, and Malayalam-Tamil translation by
machine will be made possible.
IIT Mumbai and Kharagpur, C-DAC Noida
UP and Pune in Maharashtra, University of Hyderabad .Jadhavpur University, Anna
University-KBC Centre, Tamil University, IIIT Allahabad, and IISc Bengaluru etc
are involved in this project where 200 researchers have been toiling since
2006.
Anna University- KBC [Kumbakonam
B.Chandrasekar] Centre had launched online Tamil dictionary in www.akaraadhi.com which even the research
scholars of International Institute of Tamil Studies just within a kilometer
distance were not aware, I found out while interacting with scholars at the
time of my speech there. Tamils know Google search engine but don’t know that
KBC Centre invented first Tamil search engine Kazhugu about which Indian
Express reported 6 years ago. Now in yesterday’s The Hindu which Tamils buy
daily news had appeared on Translation machine, let them touch their conscience
and ask how many of them read this or tried this. If Tamil doctorate holders
imagine they have scaled the highest peak in their career let them recall
Ayyaiyar whose golden words reminds them to know in Tamil related technological
developments and train their students in its usage.
Having issued sermon these scholars,
you would ask what you had done. My research paper in English was translated by
machine in Russian, Greek, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, German and
Arabic. It should be borne that machine translations are not perfect and it
will take a decade to achieve perfection, but I had made an attempt. I might
have faltered in my steps but nevertheless I attempted. Aringnar Anna used to
often say ‘ I know my height “, similarly I am not a scholar but always a
student in Tamil. Let Tamil scholars/ Tamil Researchers at least read in what
direction wind in blowing in Information Technology field and in which way our
students can enrich their knowledge.
N.Nandhivarman
General Secretary Dravida Peravai
4.4.2011
No comments:
Post a Comment