The problems and prospects of machine translation in India a linguistic perspective

Abstract

377 Thesis Abstract I) Introduction: The translators, linguists and computer scientists all over the world are working on the Machine Translation Technology. Machine translation is a hot cake today in the fast-changing global scenario. However, these experts from various disciplines use different methodologies and perspectives for realising the dreamtarget of Machine Translation i.e. FAHQGPMT (Fully Automatic High Quality General Purpose Machine Translation). The workforce in the field of machine translation is not unanimous in the tools, techniques, methodologies and processing. Each team and individual is investigating in his own way- once again at the Tower of Babel ! Machine Translation is an automatic translation of texts from natural language to another with the help of a computer software. The machine translation process includes decoding the meaning of the source text and re-encoding this meaning in the target language. Machine translation Systems make use of the resources like e-dictionaries, corpora, morphological analysers ,parsers, terminological databases, thesauri etc. Machine Translation systems use various methods Linguistic Rule-based Method, Transfer method, Statistical Method, Dictionary based method and Hybrid methods. In India, the various group working in this field use different methods to suite their special applications. There is no adequate sharing of 378 resources. Hence, Indian Machine Translation scenario is characterised by an acute scarcity of basic language resources such as corpora, lexicons for Indian languages. Machine translation is a relatively new field in India. MT was introduced in India only after the mid-eighties. The pioneering efforts were initiated at IIT, Kanpur. Some other institutions joined soon this field of exciting opportunities. They include IIIT Hyderabad, C-DAC, Mumbai, Computer and Information Sciences Department. The Department of Information Technology undertook these activities under the Technology Development in Indian Languages (TDIL) programm