Bilingual dictionaries to promote India`s mother tongues
Delhi: The campaign to preserve vernacular mother tongues and make knowledge accessible to
students through translation across the linguistic arc has taken a big stride with a new bilingual
dictionary series in Hindi, Bengali, Oriya, Malayalam, Tamil and Kannada from the source
language, English.
An initiative of the Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL), National Translation Mission,
Regional Institute of South Asia and Pearson Education, the six bilingual dictionaries is the first
lot of the 11 dictionaries that the government is collaborating on with Pearson under its
Longman imprint.
"The dictionaries, released in the national capital Saturday, aims to fulfil the National Translation
Mission`s mandate to develop translation tools for 22 Indian languages under the Eighth
Schedule of the Constitution," said Aditi Mukherjee, project manager of the National Translation
Mission.
The second lot of the language dictionaries that are in the works include Gujarati, Marathi,
Punjabi, Telugu and Urdu, Mukherjee said.
"One of the primary mandates of the National Translation Mission, set up three years ago under
the ministry of human resource development, is to promote academic education across 70-odd
disciplines in 22 languages by translating 100 books in each discipline. The lexicon is an
important translation tool - kind of a spring board to push the mother tongues, many of which
are threatened with very few speakers," Mukherjee told reporters
The Longman-NTM-CIIL dictionaries have over 12,000 words and phrases culled from the British
National Corpus.
Translation studies as a concept took roots in the country in 1986 when the ministry of human
resource development presented a document, "Programme of Action" - to make translation an
academic and commercial pursuit.
The paper, conceptualised by late Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao, a linguist, led to the
establishment of the Centre for Applied Linguistics and Translation Studies (CALTS) at the
University of Hyderabad.
It was later followed by a translation website, ‘Anukriti’ under the 10th Five-Year Plan and the
National Translation Mission with the CIIL as its nodal agency.
"The target group of the National Translation Mission is those university students who do not
know English. We have to look at how to disseminate or translate from English and to English.
We have identified 105 books and have acquired rights for 23 books from source publishers to
be translated in different languages," Mukherjee said.
The mission assigns the task of translation to the publisher or deputes a translator from the
National Register for Translators, a pool of government translators, the project director said.
Recalling the beginning of the dictionary project, Udaya Narayan Singh, former director of CIIL
and pro-vice-chancellor of Visva Bharati University in Shantiniketan, told IANS, "The idea for the
dictionaries was sown when Pearson published my book, `Translation as Growth: Towards a
Theory of Language Development` in 2009. At the time, I had just completed work on
connecting Microsoft`s Windows 7 to 12 Indian languages. I was also working on bi-lingual
language dictionaries..."
Singh said he was earlier a part of "Anusaraka" - the National Language Processing Project - a
linguistic collaboration between Hyderabad University and IIT-Kanpur.
"I suggested online dictionaries to Longman from which we culled the idea for language lexicons
in print with 12,000 words," Singh said.
"The idea is to create a translation industry as recommended by the National Knowledge
Commission by mobilising the publishing stakeholders (both private and public) and getting the
regional language publishers into the loop. They know how to reach the readers," Aditi
Mukherjee said.
The 22 Indian mother tongues that the National Translation Mission has taken up for promotion
have 134 dialects, Udaya Narayan Singh said.
"This accounts for 96 percent of India`s population. The remaining four percent speaks 600
languages," Singh said.
"The government has taken the depleting linguistic groups into account and is relooking at the
Linguistic Survey of India after 100 years. It has asked some states to come up with parallel
survey reports," CIIL director S.N. Burman told reporters.
The National Translation Mission is also trying to set up lexicon bases for languages like Santhali,
Konkani, Marathi, Bodo and Sanskrit, Udaya Narayan Singh said.
"You need to introduce the threatened mother tongues in primary schools which has many
implications," Singh said.
students through translation across the linguistic arc has taken a big stride with a new bilingual
dictionary series in Hindi, Bengali, Oriya, Malayalam, Tamil and Kannada from the source
language, English.
An initiative of the Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL), National Translation Mission,
Regional Institute of South Asia and Pearson Education, the six bilingual dictionaries is the first
lot of the 11 dictionaries that the government is collaborating on with Pearson under its
Longman imprint.
"The dictionaries, released in the national capital Saturday, aims to fulfil the National Translation
Mission`s mandate to develop translation tools for 22 Indian languages under the Eighth
Schedule of the Constitution," said Aditi Mukherjee, project manager of the National Translation
Mission.
The second lot of the language dictionaries that are in the works include Gujarati, Marathi,
Punjabi, Telugu and Urdu, Mukherjee said.
"One of the primary mandates of the National Translation Mission, set up three years ago under
the ministry of human resource development, is to promote academic education across 70-odd
disciplines in 22 languages by translating 100 books in each discipline. The lexicon is an
important translation tool - kind of a spring board to push the mother tongues, many of which
are threatened with very few speakers," Mukherjee told reporters
The Longman-NTM-CIIL dictionaries have over 12,000 words and phrases culled from the British
National Corpus.
Translation studies as a concept took roots in the country in 1986 when the ministry of human
resource development presented a document, "Programme of Action" - to make translation an
academic and commercial pursuit.
The paper, conceptualised by late Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao, a linguist, led to the
establishment of the Centre for Applied Linguistics and Translation Studies (CALTS) at the
University of Hyderabad.
It was later followed by a translation website, ‘Anukriti’ under the 10th Five-Year Plan and the
National Translation Mission with the CIIL as its nodal agency.
"The target group of the National Translation Mission is those university students who do not
know English. We have to look at how to disseminate or translate from English and to English.
We have identified 105 books and have acquired rights for 23 books from source publishers to
be translated in different languages," Mukherjee said.
The mission assigns the task of translation to the publisher or deputes a translator from the
National Register for Translators, a pool of government translators, the project director said.
Recalling the beginning of the dictionary project, Udaya Narayan Singh, former director of CIIL
and pro-vice-chancellor of Visva Bharati University in Shantiniketan, told IANS, "The idea for the
dictionaries was sown when Pearson published my book, `Translation as Growth: Towards a
Theory of Language Development` in 2009. At the time, I had just completed work on
connecting Microsoft`s Windows 7 to 12 Indian languages. I was also working on bi-lingual
language dictionaries..."
Singh said he was earlier a part of "Anusaraka" - the National Language Processing Project - a
linguistic collaboration between Hyderabad University and IIT-Kanpur.
"I suggested online dictionaries to Longman from which we culled the idea for language lexicons
in print with 12,000 words," Singh said.
"The idea is to create a translation industry as recommended by the National Knowledge
Commission by mobilising the publishing stakeholders (both private and public) and getting the
regional language publishers into the loop. They know how to reach the readers," Aditi
Mukherjee said.
The 22 Indian mother tongues that the National Translation Mission has taken up for promotion
have 134 dialects, Udaya Narayan Singh said.
"This accounts for 96 percent of India`s population. The remaining four percent speaks 600
languages," Singh said.
"The government has taken the depleting linguistic groups into account and is relooking at the
Linguistic Survey of India after 100 years. It has asked some states to come up with parallel
survey reports," CIIL director S.N. Burman told reporters.
The National Translation Mission is also trying to set up lexicon bases for languages like Santhali,
Konkani, Marathi, Bodo and Sanskrit, Udaya Narayan Singh said.
"You need to introduce the threatened mother tongues in primary schools which has many
implications," Singh said.
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