Former President of India A.P.J.Abdul Kalam on 30 th March 2011 launched in Hyderabad Sampark Machine Translation systems for Indian languages. Sampark Translation machine can now translate from Punjabi to Hindi, Hindi to Punjabi, Urdu to Hindi and Telugu to Tamil. This was reported in page 10 of The Hindu dated April 3 of 2011 with pride proclaiming basic version translates 4 Indian language pairs. Though happy about the technological progress I am also sad that my mother tongue Tamil is lacking behind in this innovation in spite of Tamils far ahead of others in Information Technology. May be they were busy in looking for good pastures abroad to satiate their desires to earn more and more and forgot Tamil for a moment. Or those Tamils left the burden to develop Tamil on the shoulders of Eelam Tamils. We only speak Tamilish and with English in our lips we block Tamil spring from our brain, by saying so these Tamils may excuse themselves from their inborn duty to develop Tamil.
Director of the International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad which accomplished this remarkable invention under Technology Development for Indian Languages programme of the Department of Information Technology till now headed by a Tamilian and DMK Minister A.Raja. A real DMK leader would have seen that Tamil achieves this feat in first place, alas another opportunity lost to Tamil when our representative was busy with money machines forgetting to develop translation machine for Tamil. As consolation to Tamils, the newspaper reports that within a year Tamil-Hindi, Telugu-Hindi, Hindi-Urdu, Kannada-Hindi, Punjabi-Hindi, Marathi-Hindi, Bengali-Hindi, Tamil-Telugu, and Malayalam-Tamil translation by machine will be made possible.
IIT Mumbai and Kharagpur, C-DAC Noida UP and Pune in Maharashtra, University of Hyderabad .Jadhavpur University, Anna University-KBC Centre, Tamil University, IIIT Allahabad, and IISc Bengaluru etc are involved in this project where 200 researchers have been toiling since 2006.
Anna University- KBC [Kumbakonam B.Chandrasekar] Centre had launched online Tamil dictionary in www.akaraadhi.com which even the research scholars of International Institute of Tamil Studies just within a kilometer distance were not aware, I found out while interacting with scholars at the time of my speech there. Tamils know Google search engine but don’t know that KBC Centre invented first Tamil search engine Kazhugu about which Indian Express reported 6 years ago. Now in yesterday’s The Hindu which Tamils buy daily news had appeared on Translation machine, let them touch their conscience and ask how many of them read this or tried this. If Tamil doctorate holders imagine they have scaled the highest peak in their career let them recall Ayyaiyar whose golden words reminds them to know in Tamil related technological developments and train their students in its usage.
Having issued sermon these scholars, you would ask what you had done. My research paper in English was translated by machine in Russian, Greek, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, German and Arabic. It should be borne that machine translations are not perfect and it will take a decade to achieve perfection, but I had made an attempt. I might have faltered in my steps but nevertheless I attempted. Aringnar Anna used to often say ‘ I know my height “, similarly I am not a scholar but always a student in Tamil. Let Tamil scholars/ Tamil Researchers at least read in what direction wind in blowing in Information Technology field and in which way our students can enrich their knowledge.
N.Nandhivarman
General Secretary Dravida Peravai
4.4.2011
TAMIL RESEARCH TOWARDS TRUTH 