Language is the soul of a culture

Language is the soul of a culture and to preserve any culture first thing we need to do is preserve the related language.

Language translation brings different cultures together. Ideas flow when literature travels from one language to another. New media has created new channels for idea flows. It provides new opportunities to let old cultures flourish.

Read about one such struggle to save a culture by Hopis.

When will we be able to make language translation technologies inexpensive enough, simple enough and fast enough for main-stream content translation? Answer is: very soon. Langulin is a step in that direction.

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Broadband for Rural India …

… will drive thirst for content in indian languages.

From rediff – How Anil Ambani plans to woo rural India

If you thought customers in semi-urban and rural markets were using mobile phones only to make calls, think again. If Reliance Communications Ventures Ltd is to be believed, this is a myth, which has been broken.

Much to its surprise, the company realised that a sizeable portion of its customers in the towns and villages of the Bimaru (Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh) states were using cellphones to log on to the Net, stream video clippings and for infotainment.

[...]

So what is the road ahead? The company expects to invest Rs 1500 crore (Rs 15 billion) annually on broadband over the next three years. Reliance executives, however, are not willing to disclose any fresh targets.

[...]

But to cater to the rural market would need specialised content apart from the popularity of entertainment (movie clips, song downloads, etc). The company has already worked out a bevy of such services – like online price of cops in mandis, weather report at local levels and of course introduction of virtually all the regional languages to surf information.

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aAqua – Translation for farmers

aAqua stands for Almost All Questions Answered. It is a multilingual online question and answer forum developed by IIT Mumbai.

It is deployed successfully in 11 kiosks covering 44 villages (supported by Ministry of Communications and IT, Development Gateway Foundation and an ICT R&D grant awarded to us by the Pan Asia group) since December 2003. The farmers of Pabal and the vicinity are aware of the aAQUA Q&A forum and have sent more than 850 questions so far with total number of posts exceeding 2000. Farmers in Pune district and around use aAQUA forums on a regular basis in aAQUA clubs. Kiosk operators charge farmers Rs 10 per query for the consultancy. Almost all of the questions have been answered in the local language (Marathi) with English answers given to people posting from outside the state. Local farmers trust the aAQUA service and are sensitive to the time it takes for the answers to arrive (current average is 1.2 days). The key to their success is that their technology enables services with people residing where they are, leveraging existing skill sets and minimizing the need of a separate team. This makes the aAQUA service scalable by stakeholders including the government, NGOs and Agri-business companies. In the current deployment farmers have to approach kiosks to send their questions. Plans for having farmers questions answered at their farm are being firmed up in Nagpur and Yeotmal Districts.

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Intel and Radiant to setup 1500 internet kiosks in India

… and that translates to new windows opening up for rural India for online content. More opportunities for Langulin to provide knowledge from other languages to Indian native languages.

Read this news from Sify.

Friday, 07 April , 2006, 08:37

Hyderabad: Radiant Infosystems Ltd has announced its tie-up with Intel Corporation to reach out its eGovernance solutions in India. The company is in the process of setting up 1,500 Internet kiosks by July end, which will serve as single-point interface to access host of government services over the Internet, besides services from private players.

Addressing a press conference here on Wednesday, the CEO of Radiant, Venu Myneni, said, “We have partnered with Intel that helps us offer their community PC platform.”

The Director of Emerging Technologies, Intel Corporation, Joydeep Bose, said, “Intel actively supports efforts to provide computer technology to places where it has not previously been available.”

Intel recently announced a new initiative to provide a community PC platform suitable for usage in rural areas. Such a system would be ideal for eGovernance and eLearning initiatives, Bose said.

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40% of rural India may be able to come online by 2007

And this means more non-English speaking people coming online with a lot of thirst for indian language content.

Microsoft, Reliance Infocomm and kiosk agencies such as Drishtee have reportedly chalked out plans to set up PC kiosks in Indian villages.

The government has also planned to set up 100,000 kiosks in the country’s villages by December 2007.If all goes as planned, more than 40 per cent of India’s countryside will be logged on to the Web by ‘07-end, reports Economic Times.

At present, there are around 10,000 internet kiosks in rural India, most of which consist of ITC’s e-Choupals.

Meanwhile, Intel has announced its Jagruti initiative in a bid to support the spread of rural internet kiosks based on the new Intel-Powered Community PCs. These PCs would be available through Intel partners HCL and Wipro.

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About Hindi language from Wikipedia

Hindi (हिन्दी hindī), an Indo-European language spoken mainly in North, Central, and West India, is one of the national languages of India. It is part of a dialect continuum of the Indo-Aryan family, bounded on the northwest and west by Panjābī, Sindhī, and Gujarātī; on the south by Marāthī; on the southeast by Orīyā; on the east by Bengālī; and on the north by Nepālī. Seeing the popularity of Hindi, BBC World Service started News in Hindi in 1940.

There are 480 million native hindi speakers in the world today.

Hindi also refers to a standardized register of Hindustani that was made one of the official languages of India. The grammatical description in this article concerns this standard Hindi.

Hindi is often contrasted with Urdū, another standardized form of Hindustani that is the official language of Pakistan and some states in India. The primary differences between the two are that Standard Hindi is written in Devanāgarī and has supplemented some of its Persian and Arabic vocabulary with words from Sanskrit, while Urdu is written in Nastaliq script, a variant of the Persio-Arabic script, and draws heavily on Persian and Arabic vocabulary. The term “Urdu” also includes dialects of Hindustani other than the standardized languages. Other than these, linguists consider Hindi and Urdu to be the same language.

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Building castles in the air …

“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

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Scaling the Language Barrier

“In the annals of computer comedy, one of the most famous anecdotes is about asking a speech recognition engine, “Recognize speech?” The translation comes back: “Wreck a nice beach.”"

Scaling the Language Barrier

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Translation as decoding

“One naturally wonders if the problem of translation could conceivably be treated as a problem in cryptography. When I look at an article in Russian, I say: ‘This is really written in English, but it has been coded in some strange symbols. I will now proceed to decode.”

Warren Weaver, March 1947

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Google dominates in machine translation tests

Search giant Google’s ambitions to make the Web more international has gotten a slight boost from a U.S. government-run test in which its translation software beat out technology from IBM and academia.

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Google’s machine translation wasn’t perfect, but it was well ahead of the competition. On a scale from zero to one, the company’s software scored 0.5137 on the Arabic tests and 0.3531 on the Chinese tests. The University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute came in second with a 0.4657 on Arabic tests and 0.3073 on Chinese. IBM scored 0.4646 on Arabic and 0.2571 on Chinese.

[...]

Read the complete news article on CNET.

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What is Machine Translation?

Okay – This was supposed to be the first post on this Blog. Here it goes – the definition of Machine Translation.

Machine translation (MT) is the application of computers to the task of translating texts from one natural language to another. One of the very earliest pursuits in computer science, MT has proved to be an elusive goal, but today a number of systems are available which produce output which, if not perfect, is of sufficient quality to be useful in a number of specific domains.

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Steve Silberman on Natural Language Processing

A renewed international effort is gearing up to design computers and software that smash language barriers and create a borderless global marketplace.

- Steve Silberman

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Koko Conversation

You might be thinking – is this a blog about Machine Aided Translation or is it about monkeys. There is a lot to learn from our conversation with Koko (gurilla).

I found it really insightful. Check it on PBS website.

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Meaning of Langulin

Langulin is a sanskrit word meaning long tail. We chose this name because we are helping the long tail of media reach new readership.

Langulin is the origin of world langur also. Langur is a monkey found in India (mostly around Himalayas). Langurs have a really long tail.

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Langulin’s Mission

To bring the medium and small size english magazines to India in indian languages using the best available technology for machine-aided translation.

Why medium and small size magazines?

• These magazines do not have resources to launch their magazines in foreign languages and new markets.
• These magazines are high growth magazines in terms of number of readership.

Initially focusing on magazines under following subjects

• Women
• Parenting
• Health & Wellness
• Home and Garden
• Travel

What is in it for the magazines?

• A new readership.
• A new revenue stream.

What is in it for the readers?

• Access to the ocean of knowledge about the subjects that they are interested in.

Long Term Vision

As the world is getting smaller and political and social boundries getting shattered there is a need for information dissemination from one country to another. Huge gaps exist in terms of access of information for everybody irrespective of the language that they use.

Our aim to bridge that gap and make all the interesting information from around the world accessible to indians who do not speak english.

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