Atanu Dey On India's Development

Google and the Indic Web

May 8, 2008 by Atanu Dey

Google says it is building the Indic web. Now they support transliteration in 5 languages — Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu. I checked out their automatic English to Hindi translation. I typed “What is your name” and got back “kya aapkay naam” — not terribly impressive.

  • http://the-redpill.blogspot.com vakibs

    Hi Atanu

    For knowing the state of the art in English to Indian language translation, check out the Shakti system of IIIT (my almamater).

    http://shakti.iiit.net/~shakti/index.html

  • Amit

    Seems like they’ve fixed that particular bug – I tried the same “What is your name?” and got the correct translation, but it failed when I tried another sentence in English.

  • lurker

    Heh – their translator is culturally optimized. I typed in “eat sh*t and die”. It translated it as “khaane aur marne paakhana” :-)

  • Vaidehi

    When James Bond movies were first presented with desified dialogues in India , any scene where Bond took a woman to bed , the standard dialogue would be :

    Chalo, hum suhaag raat manayenge:)