Lesson No. 5 Information in Indian Languages

Lesson No. 5  Information in Indian Languages

1.  What IS Unicode?

Unicode is the universal character encoding standard for written characters and text. It is developed by the Unicode Consortium. It defines a consistent way of encoding multilingual text that enables the exchange of text data internationally and across different platforms and operating systems.

Unicode allows a single document to contain characters or text from many scripts and languages, and allows such documents to be used on all computer systems, whatever the operating system or language.

Unicode is supported by all the latest browsers, so web pages made in different languages could be easily displayed without any compatibility issues.

2.  What is transliteration?

To transliterate means to spell or represent phonetically the words or letter of one language, say Marathi, in the letters or characters of another language, say English.

Transliteration simply converts a text from one script to another. The speech sounds of a Morathi word or syllable, as it is pronounced, are used to type in English. Transliteration then phonetically converts to the similarly pronounced letters and vowel signs of Marathi.

Example - mhais   will transliterated to म्हैस,   ganaadheesh to गणाधीश

Transliteration is different from translation. Translation retains the meaning of the words across different languages, while Transliteration only retains the sounds of the words.

3.  Explain Google translate in detail.
Google Translate is a free service from Google which automatically translates from one language to another. This translation is done automatically using Natural Language Processing. (NLP)

Today Google provides translation in 80 languages worldwide. It also provides translation for 9 Indian Languages including, Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, Kannada, Tamil, Punjabi, Urdu, and Telugu.

Google translate works completely automatically by detecting patterns in other documents which have been translated by human beings. It uses these patterns to translate the document and its accuracy therefore depends upon how many documents that were previously translated by humans, are available.

To translate, select the source and target languages and start typing.  After the space bar is pressed, the translation of the typed word will be displayed in the target script. For some words, the program shows a simple dictionary at the bottom indicating parts of speech and possible word variations and meanings.

You can also embed Google Translate Web Element while creating a web page a can allow an user to view the web page in the preferred language.

The Google translate service also includes a Text-to-speech converter which helps in improving the accuracy as well as allows the user to learn to speak the language. Google translate is also available on Android based devices such as mobile phones and tablets.