• Investment World
• eWorld
• Brand Line
• Mentor
• Life
• Brand Quest
• The New Manager
• Smartbuy

Stocks

• Quotes
• SE Diary
• Scoreboard
• Open-End Mutual Fund

Cross Currency

• Rates
  
  

Shipping

• Ports
  
  

Archives

• Yesterday
• Datewise
• Resources
• In Focus
• In Depth
• Events 2007

Group Sites

• The Hindu
• The Hindu ePaper
• Business Line
• Business Line ePaper
• Sportstar
• Frontline
• The Hindu eBooks
• The Hindu Images

Our Bureau

New Delhi, May 6 Google has announced the launch of ‘Google Translate’ service for Hindi, enabling automated translation between Hindi and English languages. User can log on to ‘ http://www.google.com/translate_t’ and opt to translate some text, Web pages, or issue a query in Hindi and have results translated from English.

“There is a huge amount of online content in English language, while the good Hindi content is still quite limited. This service would allow Hindi-speaking community to access English content and vice-versa,” said Mr Rahul Roy Chowdhury, Product Manager with Google.

In a statement issued here, the company said, “Of the total literate Indian population, only about 13 per cent are English literate. Keeping this in mind, this launch is a step towards ensuring that Hindi speaking users in India can benefit from the richness of the Internet, regardless of their familiarity with English language.”

This launch is the latest in a series of updates focused on making it easier for multi-lingual users in India to access information.

However, it is pertinent to mention here that automatic translation in certain cases may not actually yield a fool-proof result. For instance, a sentence picked up from a Hindi site – Yeh hain kuch pariyojanayein jo chal rahi hain (These are some of the projects that are operational) was actually translated to ‘the projects are some who were running’. Similarly, on another English Web page ‘Sensex down by 110 points’ was translated in Hindi as ‘Sensex 110 ank neeche dwara’.

“The machine translation can never be perfect, but it is still an important tool to extract information. Moreover, as more people use it, the increased training data would improve the translation outcomes.

“Also one must remember that the results vary on the type of document which is being translated, with better outcomes for news-related Web pages,” he said.

More Stories on : New Products & Services | Linguistics

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication :: Printer Friendly Page

Stories in this Section
Sutherland plans new global campus in Chennai

Copyright © 2008, The Hindu Business Line. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu Business Line