Atanu Dey on India’s Development

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Google and the Indic Web

May 8th, 2008 · 4 Comments

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.

Tags: Public Service Announcement

4 responses so far ↓

  • 1 vakibs // May 9, 2008 at 1:19 pm

    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

  • 2 Amit // May 9, 2008 at 9:23 pm

    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.

  • 3 lurker // May 10, 2008 at 3:59 am

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

  • 4 Vaidehi // May 10, 2008 at 2:00 pm

    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:)

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