Indic to go truly Indian

Google’s Indic has already made it possible for Bengalis, North Indians and Tamils to read an e-mail or a document written in English in their native script. Now engineers at Google are going a step further. Soon an user will be able to “skip” the English step and seamlessly translate between two Indic languages!

That is what a team at Google’s development centre in Bangalore is currently working on. “There are 100 billion pages on the Internet, of which 20-30 million are in Indic languages,” says Prasad Ram, Director, India Research Labs, Google.

“India is unique since the Internet has developed in English rather than in local languages,” adds Rahul Roy Chowdhury, leader of the Indic language development team in Google. It was Roy Chowdhury’s team that developed the transliteration tool allowing users to create Indic language content (in eight languages currently) using the Roman script of most computer keyboards. For instance, it can convert any of the over a billion English articles on Wikipedia into Hindi.

But the really exciting stuff is just around the corner. In a country with 23 official languages, Google’s tool will allow web users to translate between two Indic languages directly. Suppose a Malayalee wants to read a Bangla article, he can soon download software to enable that without an in-between “English” step.