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Home » Public Service Announcement

Google and the Indic Web

8 May 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.

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4 Comments »

  • vakibs said:

    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

    # 9 May 2008 at 1:19 pm
  • Amit said:

    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.

    # 9 May 2008 at 9:23 pm
  • lurker (author) said:

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

    # 10 May 2008 at 3:59 am
  • Vaidehi said:

    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:)

    # 10 May 2008 at 2:00 pm