Universal Language to scale Tower of Babel

<div class="section1"><div class="Normal">MUMBAI: When men proposed to build a tower reaching up to the heavens in ancient times, says scripture, God disposed of the plan by creating different languages to divide them.<br /><br />Now, the Indian Institute of Technology, Powai, and top universities of 18 countries worldwide have come together in a United Nations project to find an answer to the Tower of Babel phenomenon.The UN project aims to unify the world and cut out the babble of diverse languages through a Universal Networking Language.<br /><br />The Universal Language, according to computer scientists, will end the reign of English as the de facto language of the internet. This means that once the word ‘love’ is converted into the Universal Language, it can emerge as pyar in Hindi or prem in Marathi or <span style="" font-style:="" italic="">bhalobasha</span> in Bengali, depending on which language the user wants. It isn’t just words either. <br /><br />“Entire websites can be converted from one language to another automatically, using the Universal Language,’’ says Pushpak Bhattacharya, professor, computer science department, IIT-Mumbai, who’s leading the project.<br /><br />IIT is the centre for Hindi, Marathi and Bengali. (Konkani may be added to the list, with help from the University of Goa.) Other countries involved in the project include Japan, China, France, Germany, the US, Brazil and Portugal. English has already been converted into the Universal Language at Princeton University in the US.<br /><br />The IIT-Mumbai team has started work onHindi andMarathi. This means they have begun grappling with ambiguous sentences like, ‘<span style="" font-style:="" italic="">Aapko mujhe mithai khilani padegi’</span>, which could mean both ‘I have to give you sweets’ or ‘You have to give me sweets’. “Word-for word translations don’t work because sentence constructions in our languages are often ambiguous,’’ says Bhattacharya. <br /><br />“In the Universal Language there’s no room for ambiguity. A translation of the above Hindi sentence in the Universal Language will specify exactly who’s giving sweets to whom.’’ One of the target users of the Universal Language, besides urban internet users, is the rural farmer who would be able to use the net in his mother tongue.<br /><br />“Obviously, there needs to be an attitudinal change before our farmers can use the net,’’ he says. “We’ve adopted a village, Pabal, near Pune, in order to study the mindset of farmers and understand their internet requirements.’’ The farmers’ main need, as they found, is solutions for diseases of plants and livestock.<br /><br />“However, many farmers are illiterate or semi-literate, so they can’t form grammatical queries,’’ he adds. “For this, we’re also developing icon-based queries, where they can just click on pictures in sequence to post a question on the net.’’<br /><br />A full-fledged translation technology from English to Hindi, English to Marathi and vice versa is slated to be made available free of cost in two years.<br /><br />A future worldwide project of the Universal Networking Digital Language involves encoding the encyclopaedia in Universal Language for the internet. IIT-Mumbai will be participating in this project too, its main areas of interest being tourism and heritage.</div> </div>