However, to do be able to employ Deep Neural Networks to language translation, the system needs to be trained using professionally translated documents. This allows the system to learn how words and phrases in one language are represented in another. And that was a big challenge when it came to Indian languages.

Challenges in Indian language translations Training the Deep Neural Networks involves inputting massive amounts of high-quality data to execute the translations. For accurate translations, the system demands millions of parallel sentences in each language pair, in all permutations and combinations. However, Indian languages, constituting of Dravidian and Aryan subdivisions, are complicated. The complexities increase while translating languages for India, where 29 different states have 22 official languages. Adding to the challenges was the dearth of digital content in Indian language, which could be pulled from the internet to train the neural networks. Even though there’s digital content that’s available, a lot of it cannot be used as it doesn’t follow standard encoding like Unicode.

“Six Indian languages are part of top 20 global languages by population. Ironically, these languages are not on top of the digital content list. There’s not enough material on the internet that we could use to train the system,” explains Krishna Doss Mohan, Senior Program Manager, Microsoft India, who is part of the team that works on Indian languages. ALSO READ: The technology behind Deep Neural Networks-powered Indian language translation Despite the obstacles, Deep Neural Networks-powered translation systems have shown significant improvement in both automatic and human evaluation metrics. More specifically, we have witnessed at least 20% improvement in translation quality for all Indic languages currently supported by Microsoft. Empowering people across the spectrum Our success in Deep Neural Networks-powered translation for Indian languages can have a game-changing impact on businesses and society. “In India, about 12% of the people can speak, read, and write English, even though it’s not their first language,” says Mohan. “There are 600 million literate people, who aren’t necessarily proficient in English and prefer to consume information in their mother tongue.”

We believe in the power of AI to improve the lives of people across the globe. In India, we are using AI-powered solutions to impact agriculture, healthcare, education, governance and more. Photos by Rajesh Cheemalakonda

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