Machine Translation Systems for Indian Languages

Machine processing of Natural (Human) Languages has a long tradition, benefiting from decades of manual and semiautomatic analysis by linguists, sociologists, psychologists and computer scientists among others. This cumulative effort has seen fruit in recent years in the form of publicly available online resources ranging from dictionaries to complete machine translation systems. Machine translation is the name for computerized methods that automate all or part of the process of translating from one language to another. In a large multilingual society like India, there is great demand for translation of documents from one language to another language. Though work in the area of machine translation has been going on for several decades, efficient methods for machine translation continue to be a challenging task. A fully automatic high quality machine translation system is extremely difficult to build. This paper discusses the various approaches which have been applied in translation systems for Indian languages. Some of the important Indian language translation systems implemented with these techniques along with their capabilities and limitations are also discussed.