Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay (IIT-B) have developed an Artificial Intelligence (AI) based software algorithm that translates scientific and technical content of engineering textbooks and learning material from English into several Indian languages, including Hindi.

The software, also known as Project Udaan, can translate these extremely complex subjects in one-sixth the time it would take for a team of domain and linguistic experts to work manually.

“The Indian Constitution requires every state and local authority to provide adequate facilities for instruction in the mother tongue at the primary stage of education to children belonging to linguistic minorities,” said professor Ganesh Ramakrishnan, IIT-B chair professor, department of computer science and engineering.

“Project Udaan’ will help translate scientific and technical terms into several languages other than English and could help students pursuing courses in engineering and technology,” he said.

Project Udaan is a donation-based project with an end-to-end ecosystem that helps in translation. “We have developed a very robust bilingual OCR (optical character recognition) technology and several post-editing tools by which we now have access to digital bilingual dictionaries in a machine-readable format. We are therefore able to use appropriate scientific and technical terms available in Hindi, instead of transliterating the English terms,” added Ramakrishnan.

Through donations, the IIT-B team aims to translate 500 engineering texts in Hindi in one year and 15 Indian languages in three years.