Government to seed fund 100 startups offering translation services

India is home to over 19,000 languages. While its pluralistic presence in languages has a unique beauty, often it acts as a roadblock in communications.

To overcome this barrier, the Indian government is planning to set up an ecosystem comprising Central, State agencies and startups offering translation services.

As part of the natural languages translation mission, the govt will directly seed fund 100 startups.

Govt will fund startups to build on Artificial Intelligence-driven technology as they can help expedite the work to build implementable solutions to help in research and teaching in many languages, said ET report quoting sources privy to the development.

It will be further used for govt initiatives such as translating videos of technical education lectures in local languages.

As an initial database, the ministry of electronics and IT (MeitY) is planning to use Parliament and Election Commission records available in many Indian languages.

The program will initially focus on text to text translation. The govt will first start with Hindi, Marathi and Gujarati languages and then expand to other languages.

At present, translation service providers in the country have a limitation when it comes to translating longer sentences. The accuracy goes down for longer sentences, and where domain knowledge issues such as legal issues are involved, added the report.

The MeitY is also said to collaborate with the IIT Madras, the IIIT Hyderabad, the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing in Pune and the Indian Institute of Science for the project.

Earlier this year, the ministry had proposed an outlay of Rs 450 crore for the mission.