Multilingual Machine Translation Approaches for Consolidated Translator:An Indian Languages Perspective

In India, there is an increasing need of consolidated translator to translate any regional language to any other regional language as per the requirement. India is a multilingual country and a variety of languages is used by people to communicate in spoken or written forms. Languages are also the base for dividing the country into states. So, Indian literature is available in various languages. The demand for translation from one regional language to another has increased in the recent years because of the increase in information exchange among different states of India. Machine Translation can be a useful tool to provide to fulfill the gap between languages. Basically Machine Translation is a field which correlates computer science and linguistics and provides human computer interaction in a natural language instead of a computer language. The research work in Machine Translation requires deep knowledge of linguistics, statistics and computer science. So it can be categorized as a multidisciplinary research area. Machine Translation can play a very useful role in language conversions such as from Punjabi to Hindi, Gujarati to Punjabi, and Hindi to Gujarati etc. It seems simple for a person who knows the source language and target language but it is very complex form computers to do the same job perfectly. A broad classification of machine translation approaches provides two paradigms i.e. Rule-Based Approach and Corpus-Based Approach. Machine Translation research for Indian Languages is being done at regional level in the country. But there is a need for multilingual conversion at one place for any Indian language to any other Indian language. Using existing research there are three approaches that can be adopted to fulfill the need. These are Conversion using Hindi/English as Intermediate Language, Direct Conversion from Source language to Target language and the mixture of these two approaches as Hybrid Conversion approach which can take the benefits of both. A consolidated multilingual translator can be very useful for Government, businesses and public to access information from different regions of country under a single platform.