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Now, Suprabhatam in English

Prabhu Ram Raghunathan has translated Sri Venkatesa Suprabhatam into English using software tools

INTEREST IN SCRIPTURES Prabhu Ram Raghunathan

Prabhu Ram Raghunathan has translated the `Sri Venkatesa Suprabhatam' from Sanskrit into English, because of his mastery over the ancient Indian language and an intellectual interest in the Hindu scriptures.

The software developer has been associated with the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Pittsburgh, primarily in connection with Professor Brian MacWhinney's the TalkBank project. Considering that his professional engagements go beyond the CMU campus, it is amazing that he finds the time for some research work "on ancient Hindu scriptures using multilingual algorithms".

Raghunathan has "written a bunch of Sanskrit processing tools to re-translate our works in multi-volume series, which I hope will be done in the next few years."

Aware of Raghunathan's interest, authorities at the Sri Venkateswara Temple, Pittsburgh requested him to translate the Suprabhatam. The software engineer readily complied and completed the book in a short period of time. Sura Books has published the work in India, as part of its culture series. It is selling the book through its distributors and outlets.

Raghunathan says the Suprabhatam translation was a sort of "field trial" for a couple of Sanskrit parsing methods. "I am a researcher in distributed artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics and my ancillary interests lie in history/indology, comparative religion and mythography. For several years now, I have been developing AI techniques to analyse Sanskrit texts, the Rg-Veda in particular, as they have large elements of historicity. These data-mining techniques seek to augment the usual philological methods used in the field. I have tried my best to make the book authentic and pleasant."

The IT man dedicates the effort to "those who wish to know what the chants mean."

PRINCE FREDERICK

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