Sachin Pilot, minister of State for Communications and
IT, Government of India launched the C-DAC Multi-lingual website at a function
held at Mumbai.
Also present on the occasion were Rajat Moona, director
general, C-DAC, Zia Saquib, executive director, C-DAC, Mumbai, Hemant Darbari,
executive director, C-DAC, Pune and other senior officials of C-DAC.
India is a multi-lingual country with as many as 22
scheduled languages and only about 5 percent of the population is able to
understand English. Several of these scheduled languages are written in
multiple scripts.
C-DAC has worked to create a multi-lingual website to
take the innovation and research along with respective applications for the
masses. The information on the website is available in 22 official languages
and is supported by 27 scripts.
The Ministry of Communications and IT has been one of
the earliest to have recognized the potential of multi-lingual computing for
the benefit of the masses, thus setting off a plethora of initiatives for the
proliferation of Information Technology through the mother tongue of the
people. Several of these early initiatives have borne fruit today and we have
made inroads into hitherto untouched areas like handwriting recognition,
optical character recognition, and machine translation in Indian languages.
This has truly opened the doors of knowledge discovery and information exchange
to millions of Indians who can interact and communicate in their mother tongues
without barriers,” said Sachin Pilot.
C-DAC has well established credentials in Multi-lingual
Computing, spanning the entire space from fonts and encoding (including
Unicode) to Machine Translation and Speech Technologies.
In a highly multi-lingual country like India, the
importance of this area cannot be overstated. In addition to continued
enhancements in existing technologies and products, C-DAC has been active in
enabling language applications on mobile platforms, national mission mode
rollout of CDs containing basic language resources for all official languages,
and significant progress in major challenging language problems such as Optical
Character Recognition (OCR), Machine Translation (MT), Cross Lingual
Information Access (CLIA), etc., through nationwide consortia projects.
C-DAC multi-lingual website is a vital link between the
organization and the outside world. While government norms advocate
bilingualism, we have been able to take this one step higher by catering to all
the 22 scheduled Indian languages. This has indeed involved a lot of work in the
background and will continue to engage us in the days to come. But we are
prepared to keep it going in the interests of the masses who can now access the
latest information on technology development and innovation in their preferred
language,” said Rajat Moona.
We are also thankful to the Ministry of Communications
and IT for their confidence and support to our endeavor, and look forward to
our role in evolving the multi-lingual roadmap for the nation’s future. This is
a key time for C-DAC to enhance its position in the greater scheme of things
with the availability of
domain names in Indian languages and the introduction of new generic
Top Level Domains or gTLDs
by ICANN. We certainly look forward to the future with a new set of
expectations and challenges,” Moona added.
By Telecomlead.com Team
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