Talk: "Indian Multi-lingual Initiatives – A holistic perspective"

The unique Multilingual Diversity of India consisting of 22 constitutionally recognized languages and 12 scripts makes the development and proliferation of software solutions a very challenging and gigantic task. This requires continuous and sustained effort to edge out challenges in all core areas namely storage and encoding, input mechanism, browser support and data exchange. Linguistic Resources and Tools are the key building blocks to develop multilingual solutions.

In this talk, I shall present an overview of the major national initiative in India i.e ‘Technology Development for Indian Languages (TDIL), for the development and standardization of Linguistic Resources and Tools towards deployment of multilingual ICT solutions in India.  One of the major achievements of our initiative is the release of Software Tools and Fonts in 22 Indian Languages under the National Roll-Out Plan. Most of the Language Technology initiatives in India are now being implemented in consortia mode with leading research and academic institutions.  The Consortia mode projects have resulted in the development of alpha versions of a few important technologies such as an English to Indian Languages Machine Translation system (9 language pairs), Indian Language to Indian Language Machine Translation systems (18 language pairs), Cross-lingual information access (CLIA) and Text to Speech systems. Several Linguistic Resources and Language Tools have also been developed in these consortia.

The complexity and vastness of the Indian Language Ecosystem also requires sustained and collaborative efforts for standardization of Linguistic Resources and Tools.  Comprehensive efforts for standardization, testing and evaluation of Linguistic Resources and Tools are also being initiated. One such effort is the standardization of a POS tag set and its XML schema following the internationalization best practices.

In the conclusion, this talk will focus on future direction and initiatives towards international collaboration.

Short Biography

Ms. Swaran Lata is presently heading the Department of Information Technology’s National Strategic programme ‘Technology Development for Indian Languages’. She is member of various international Standardization bodies ISO, UNICODE, W3C and ELRA. She has  been instrumental in getting all 22 officially recognized languages including Vedic Sanskrit incorporated in UNICODE. She is also Country Manager, W3C India Office.  Ms. Swaran Lata has a very vast and in depth experience in the proliferation of Indian Language solutions.

Her key Achievements are:

• Leading role in finalizing the UNICODE encoding system for 22 Indian Languages and Vedic Sanskrit
• Key role in initiating mission mode consortium projects in the Development of English-Hindii Machine Translation systems and Indian language to Indian language Machine Translation Systems, Optical Character Recognition Systems,
• Key role in establishing W3C India office and leading the activity of Internationalization requirements in W3C standards.
• Member of W3C Consortium’s “Global Vision Task Force”
• Major focus is to take ICT to grassroots through the localisation of operating systems,, building linguistic resources, and facilitating the localization of applications especially the localization requirements of e-government.
• Member of the Editorial Board of Vishwabharat@tdil quarterly journal for dissemination of TDIL Programme
• She Joined Govt. of India through Indian Engg. Services, 1980 and Since 1994, working with Technology Development for Indian Languages (TDIL) Programme
• She holds bachelor’s degree in Electronics & Communication with Gold Medal from Thapar Inst. of Engg & Technology and M.tech in Computer Technology from IIT Delhi.