From robotics to theatre studies
The National Translation Mission, in addition to creating a National Register for Translators and a storehouse of information, will give accreditation to these people to function as “NTM translators.”
Translation of reference books, journals, college and university textbooks, open pedagogic materials, specialised books, critical studies, instructional manuals in engineering and biological studies etc., will be done in 22 Indian languages.
“The non-urban and non-elite find it difficult to cope with the knowledge explosion, most of which is happening in English. China, Korea and Japan have done phenomenal work in translation. Hence, our objective is to provide literary and knowledge texts in their (target beneficiaries’) own languages and therefore the Mission has been launched,” according to the Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL) Director Udaya Narayan Singh.
The Mission will touch upon all major disciplines to select texts for translation. The chief domain areas have been categorised into priority I and priority II. Robotics, sculpture, theatre studies, engineering, culture studies, biochemistry, astrophysics and other disciplines have been included in NTM.
Grants
It facilitates publication grant for translators; subsidies for journals; and grants for authors and translators, non-literary translation work, translation training, making electronic dictionary, NLP research-related translation, universities conducting courses on translation, major translation awards, translation from Indian languages to major European languages (except English) and translation from Indian languages to Asian and African languages.
The NTM will prioritise creation of digital dictionaries and ‘Machine-Aided Translation Software’ among different language pairs. “But since the IITs and universities, IIITs, TIFR and IISc. together as well as many large software giants have been working on the tough problem of Machine Translation (MT) for the last two decades, the NTM will emphasise on this area cautiously,” it says. Importantly, efforts will be made for the creation of high quality translation tools such as dictionaries, word-finders, online look-ups and sourcing software for translation, memory, wordnet etc., and also to explore if these facilities could be made available in newer and wider platforms such as mobile technology.
The Union Government, which is funding the NTM, has asked the CIIL to explore the possibilities of popularising online dictionaries, including dictionaries on mobile phones.
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