India’s Odia language added to Google and Microsoft translation services · Global Voices
Collage of Odia Book Covers. Image via Flickr by <PERSON>. From the Flickr set Odia Book Covers. CC-BY 2.0.
While open-source initiatives are still underway, Google and Microsoft have both added the Odia language of India to their respective machine translation engines this year — Google Translate in February and Microsoft more recently on August 13.
Odia is the official language of the Indian state of Odisha and the second official language in the state of Jharkhand. It's spoken by about 35 million native speakers and as a second language by about 4 million people. It is also classified by the Indian government as one of the country's classical languages based on a set of requirements that includes a literary tradition of more than 1,500 years.
However, Odia's digital presence is limited. For instance, the Odia Wikipedia, which is one of the largest repository of textual content, currently has only 15,858 articles after being revived in 2011 following a nine-year-long hiatus. In contrast, Malayalm, which is spoken by about almost the same number of speakers as Odia, has about 70K articles on Wikipedia. Content in Odia used to be available online in the form of image and PDF for a very long time — some including the Odisha state government-run magazine Utkal Prasanga still continue to publish in a combination of image and PDF. Late adoption of Unicode has made content less searchable.
Machine translation significantly contributes to increasing the digital presence of languages by making content more searchable and more accessible to non-speakers.
Microsoft-operated cloud services, including Microsoft Translator app, Office, Translator for Bing, and through the Azure Cognitive Services Translator, will now all support translations from Odia. 607
Both Microsoft Translator and Google Translate (available both on the web and as an app) allow translation of text copied directly into the input field.
Additionally, these platforms also support the translation of text documents, websites, and of live-chats. The Google Translate mobile app has additional features, including offline translation, handwriting recognition, scanning, translating and reading text from images, and using voice command to speak to a foreign-language speaker. A feature called “tap to translate” allows a user to directly translate a typed text inside any app. One can also hear how a text in a supported language is pronounced using Google’s speech synthesis.
The addition of Odia was thus well-received by the Odisha state government. The Office of the Chief Minister of Odisha tweeted:
#OdiaTranslation has now been added by @Microsoft to its @mstranslator, becoming the 12th commonly used Indian language to be added. This will facilitate access of global information in #Odia and promote inter-language interactions. https://t.co/O4dZgZhbrs
— CMO Odisha (@CMO_Odisha) August 17, 2020
The Electronics and Information Technology Department of the Government of Odisha also reacted:
Used by millions across the world, @Google Translate has now added #Odia to its list of supported languages. A major step towards promoting digital literacy in our native language & to help millions of non-speakers embrace it. #OdiaOnGoogle @CMO_Odisha https://t.co/lfSskvxSjR
— E&IT Department Odisha (@EIT_Odisha) February 28, 2020
Machine Translation
Machine translation is used to translate the text or speech of the source language to a target language. The translation that Google uses relies on the Neural Machine Translation, a computational system that uses a technique called artificial neural network where large datasets consisting of translation of phrases (from source to target language) are used for training.
With the inclusion of Odia, Google Translate and Microsoft Translator now support 11 Indian languages each. In total, Google supports 109 world languages while Microsoft supports 73.
Meanwhile, open-source initiatives are yet to create successful machine translation projects in Odia.
At least one open-source community-led project is in development — MTEnglish2Odia is training a machine translation engine by collecting translation pairs from existing sources such as Odia-language Wikipedia and crowdsourcing from user contributions on Twitter.
In addition, there are some research and resources that can be used for building machine translation engines by other organizations.
The politics of machine translation
The technology used by Google Translate or Microsoft Translator is complex from social, legal, ethical, and rights aspects.
A machine translation platform can be of great use for many people, including journalists to quickly access news from multiple languages, or students desiring to learn from multilingual resources. 607