Lectures trans created from English to five Indian languages

Lectures trans created from English to five Indian languages

Context-

• In India, people speak many different languages, yet the medium of higher education is mainly English.
• It would be a grand feat if quality lectures available in English could be transcreated into various Indian languages.
• This idea first occurred to Prof. Rajeev Sangalof Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) Hyderabad, who in discussion with then Principal Scientific Advisor to the Prime Minister Prof. Vijay Raghavan, initiated the process.

Aim of the project-

• This project aims to transcreate about 40,000 videos of lectures from the NPTEL and SWAYAM programmes into five Indian languages at first and then into 13.
• The pilot project spiralled out from IIIT Hyderabad, with Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras and IIT Bombay as partners. 

The process

• In the project, every video is first subjected to speech recognition.
• The extracted file is cleaned up with errors being manually removed (at IIIT Hyderabad and IIT Bombay).
• The identification and discovery of technical “domain terms” is done at IIIT Hyderabad.
• This is followed bytext to text machine translation, carried out at IIIT Hyderabad and IIT Bombay.
• A manual error correction is then done at IIT Madras and IIIT Hyderabad. From the translated, corrected text, speech is synthesised at IIT Madras where also the speech is made to synchronise with the lip movement.
• In future, this technology would develop to the extent that the synthesised speech will perfectly match with the original speaker’s voice itself.
• The project is meant to engage a large number of startups for not only technical lectures, but also general topics.

Future goals

• In all, 75 videos have been transcreated in five different Indian languages.
• Once machine translation is developed for more languages, this can be extended to 13 languages.
• The software is indigenous and available in open source, and to startups for commercial purposes at no fee.
• Future goals include making 100 courses available in 18 Indian languages.

Also, the researchers plan to perform spoken language identification, provide keyword search and transcreations between two Indian languages and Indian English.