Language Access: An Information Based Approach

The anusaaraka system (a kind of machine translation system) makes text in one Indian language accessible through another Indian language. The machine presents an image of the source text in a language close to the target language. In the image, some constructions of the source language (which do not have equivalents in the target language) spill over to the output. Some special notation is also devised. Anusaarakas have been built from five pairs of languages: Telugu,Kannada, Marathi, Bengali and Punjabi to Hindi. They are available for use through Email servers. Anusaarkas follows the principle of substitutibility and reversibility of strings produced. This implies preservation of information while going from a source language to a target language. For narrow subject areas, specialized modules can be built by putting subject domain knowledge into the system, which produce good quality grammatical output. However, it should be remembered, that such modules will work only in narrow areas, and will sometimes go wrong. In such a situation, anusaaraka output will still remain useful.

Anusaaraka: Overcoming the Language Barrier in India

The anusaaraka system makes text in one Indian language accessible in another Indian language. In the anusaaraka approach, the load is so divided between man and computer that the language load is taken by the machine, and the interpretation of the text is left to the man. The machine presents an image of the source text in a language close to the target language.In the image, some constructions of the source language (which do not have equivalents) spill over to the output. Some special notation is also devised. The user after some training learns to read and understand the output. Because the Indian languages are close, the learning time of the output language is short, and is expected to be around 2 weeks. The output can also be post-edited by a trained user to make it grammatically correct in the target language. Style can also be changed, if necessary. Thus, in this scenario, it can function as a human assisted translation system. Currently, anusaarakas are being built from Telugu, Kannada, Marathi, Bengali and Punjabi to Hindi. They can be built for all Indian languages in the near future. Everybody must pitch in to build such systems connecting all Indian languages, using the free software model.

Anusaaraka: Machine Translation in Stages

Fully-automatic general-purpose high-quality machine translation systems (FGH-MT) are extremely difficult to build. In fact, there is no system in the world for any pair of languages which qualifies to be called FGH-MT. The reasons are not far to seek. Translation is a creative process which involves interpretation of the given text by the translator. Translation would also vary depending on the audience and the purpose for which it is meant. This would explain the difficulty of building a machine translation system. Since, the machine is not capable of interpreting a general text with sufficient accuracy automatically at present - let alone re-expressing it for a given audience, it fails to perform as FGH-MT. FOOTNOTE{The major difficulty that the machine faces in interpreting a given text is the lack of general world knowledge or common sense knowledge.}