Great Developers Blog

New language translation tool unveiled at the 20th International WWW conference. 

Former President APJ Abdul Kalam today launched the Machine translation (MT) systems, also called content multiplier tools, developed with funding from TDIL (Technology Development for Indian Languages) programme at the 20th International World Wide Web conference in Hyderabad.

Based on the Computational Paninian grammar (CPG), which works very well for free word-order languages, Indian languages in particular, the tools are available in three modules Sampark (Indian to Indian), AnglaMT (English to Bengali, Malayalam, Punjabi and Urdu) and Anvadaksh (English to Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Oriya, Urdu and Tamil).

 “India has more than 122 languages of which 22 are official. More than a billion people all over the world speak either Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil or Urdu. With the availability of e-content and development of language technology, it is now possible to overcome the language barrier,&” Rajeev Sangal, director of IIIT-Hyderabad (one of the 17 institutions that participated in the development of the tools), told mediapersons.

 Sangal said three consortia comprising 17 academic and research institutions were involved in building 26 different pairs of languages. Right now, 12 pairs are available and the plan is to release more pairs every three-four months, he added.

“An amount of Rs 13 crore went into the whole exercise and about 200 students were directly involved in the development of these tools. An additional 200 students worked on the project as a thesis and their algorithms were embedded into the systems directly,&” Sangal said.

The MT quality, Sangal said, was better in case of translation between Indian languages because they were similar in many ways, both in grammar and vocabulary. Translation between English and Indian languages is harder and hence the output quality is likely to be inferior.

“We are now asking users to try using the tool as an experiment. Our only focus now is on improving quality” he said.

Stating that the MT technology is currently freely accessible, Sangal said the MT initiative would be monetised when special needs for further research arises. 

“Company-based efforts can also be initiated. We are already working with translation houses and publishers,&” he said, adding students at the IIT-Hyderabad were working on a text-to-speech system, and at some point these two technologies (text-to-speech and MT systems) will be combined together.

Global sales of smartphones will probably increase at a slower pace this year, with Google Inc. (GOOG)’s Android likely to become the world’s best-selling smartphone system, according to International Data Corp.

Shipments of handsets that allow users to surf the Internet and download movies and music may gain 49 percent this year to more than 450 million units, the Framingham, Massachusetts-based researcher said in a report today. The rate lags the 74 percent growth last year when consumers made purchases they’d delayed during the recession.

Android, which is available on handsets from dozens of vendors including Samsung Electronics Corp. and HTC Corp. (2498), has built its market share in less than three years to challenge Nokia Oyj (NOK1V)’s Symbian as the market leader. Nokia, the biggest maker of mobile phones, said last month it will move to Microsoft Corp. (MSFT)’s Windows Phone 7 as its primary operating system in a transition that is expected to last through 2012.

“For vendors who made Android the cornerstone of their smartphone strategies, 2010 was the coming-out party,” IDC analyst Ramon Llamas said in the report. “This year will see a coronation party as these same vendors broaden and deepen their portfolios to reach more customers, particularly first-time smartphone users.”

Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 could be the second-largest operating platform behind Android by 2015 as it benefits from Nokia production capacity, IDC said today.

Android may have 39.5 percent of the smartphone market this year, passing Symbian’s share of 20.9 percent, IDC predicted. Symbian could fall to 0.2 percent in 2015, the researcher said. Windows Phone 7 and older Microsoft systems will run on 5.5 percent of units shipped this year, it said.

Android grew more than ninefold in 2010, according to Gartner Inc. research on unit sales to end users. The Google system had 22.7 percent of the smartphone market for the full year, compared with 37.6 percent for Symbian, Gartner said Feb. 2.

Novell has announced that Moonlight 4 is now available. This version of Moonlight comes with full support for all prior version of Silverlight and preview support for Silverlight 4, including support of Microsoft-licensed codecs for Silverlight 3 and 4, today’s announcement marks the first time that Moonlight has shipped a release consistent with many popular sites built for the latest release of Silverlight. This release gives Firefox* and Google Chrome* users on Linux access to the latest Silverlight content and enables developers to take advantage of the newest features of Silverlight on all platforms.

For more information refer to this post  on novell.