Language is the most potent and important invention of ingenious mankind. Languages are the tool to code the stories of human endeavours evolving over edges. The diversity of languages around the globe beautifully signify the versatility, uniqueness and robustness of human societies. India is blessed with a heritage which nurtures diversity and its languages. As smartphones penetrate their way into even the remotest areas across the globe, a new market space is being created for different sectors, especially tech-based firms. Not only are the Hyperlocal trends and cultures being brought to the fore but regional populace is being observed and listened to like never before. Thus, regional relativity and digital connectivity together have made the need of running services multilingual, almost immediate.
Global-Tech and electronic giants, media firms, publishing houses, etc. are interested in Indian markets because of the untapped potential here and wide range of target group and consumer base. With more and more exposure to globalisation, digital gadgets, online buying and selling, social networking and strengthening of the digital payments ecosystem, Indian citizenry is waiting for seamless services and flexibility. The readiness is bringing up new multilingual versions of services across almost all sectors giving Indian culture and languages a special priority and global recognition. This will also result in more and more startups in India, more employment, better educational landscape, more networking, branding and advertisement, enhanced digital banking and mobile penetration, better digital literacy, all contributing eventually in boosting India’s economy exponentially.
The Linguistic Divide is bigger than the Digital Divide but the digital infrastructure is responsible for bridging the gap to create a bigger impact. India is a country with around 425 different languages and dialects. India also has a huge base of internet subscribers and the lack of content in local languages means that users’ experience is highly impacted. Aligning with this, recently Google has announced the addition of eight Indian languages including Sanskrit to Google Translate, with the view to increase the number of regional languages supported by its online multilingual translation service. Besides Sanskrit, the other Indian languages in the latest iteration of Google Translate are Assamese, Bhojpuri, Dogri, Konkani, Maithili, and Meiteilon (Manipuri), Mizo and Sanskrit. This update is part of a bigger plan wherein Google is further expected to add 24 Indian languages to Google Translate, which now supports a total of 133 languages used around the globe. In terms of the technology, these are the first languages that have been added using the zero-shot machine translation, where a machine learning model only sees monolingual text, meaning it learns to translate it into another language without ever seeing an example. Although Google says that this technology is not perfect but the company is working towards improving it. Though this update will only be supported in the text translation feature for now, Google may also work on rolling out voice to text, camera mode, and other features too.
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