national translation mission (india), a new government funded program Options

[arnab]

link

Translation has a future. The National Knowledge Commission, set up in 2006 by the Prime Minister, has cleared the setting up of the National Translation Mission (NTM) in just the last week of June. To be implemented by the Mysore-based Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL), the ambitious exercise will also involve the Commission for Scientific and Technical Terminology (CSTT), the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT), the National Book Trust (NBT), the University Grants Commission (UGC), the Sahitya Akademi, the Granth Akademies and public library networks.

NTM will be expected to make available good-quality translation of knowledge-based texts into all eighth Schedule languages — that's 22 at the last count —Assamese, Bangla, Bodo, Dogri, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali Oriya Punjabi Sanskrit Santhali Sindhi Tamil Telugu And Urdu. Its brief includes generating high-quality translation tools such as dictionaries and software, education of translator, development of scientific and technical terminology in all of the above and promotion of machine translation and machine-aided translation.

The plan is to translate 2,500 books in this plan period and another 8,000 in the next five years. The central government has released Rs 99 crore under the 11th Plan. Part of these monies will be used to hire the 8,000 translators 2,000 copy editors and 2,000 evaluators required for the mission.

[vaathsyaayana]

(i) Would anyone here help me translate a book on cancer biology from English to Tamil? At least a single chapter?

NTM will be expected to make available good-quality translation of knowledge-based texts into all eighth Schedule languages — that's 22 at the last count —Assamese, Bangla, Bodo, Dogri, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali Oriya Punjabi Sanskrit Santhali Sindhi Tamil Telugu And Urdu. Its brief includes generating high-quality translation tools such as dictionaries and software, education of translator, development of scientific and technical terminology in all of the above and promotion of machine translation and machine-aided translation.

Commendable, commendable indeed.

However, the sums of money mentioned do raise eyebrows - Rs 99 crore?

And, as a matter of fact, I've wanted to do something similar myself (no, not handle such vast amounts of money, but to translate scientific textbooks from English into other languages - Tamil, for instance). Of course, as a single individual, working on my own, I'd be no match for teams of thousands of professionals, but, still, I've had the idea for quite some time, even before I heard about this NTM plan... but despite my best intentions, I haven't been able to find many people willing to help me when I've asked for help.

For example, if I told you all that I wanted to translate "Molecular Biology of Human Cancers: An Advanced Student's Textbook" (Schulz, WA; 2007, Springer) from English to Tamil - or any other language, for that matter - is there a single person here who would volunteer to help? (Of course, I myself am busy with other matters to deal with at this point in time, nevertheless, in a few weeks, I will have the time... but will there be anyone from here willing to help me?)

If you feel you cannot help me translate the whole book, I'd be grateful if you could help even with a single chapter from the book.

By the way, as I type this, the link posted by Arnab is broken already, but I was able to obtain information on the NTM from other sources.

This post has been edited by vaathsyaayana: Jul 30 2008, 02:20 AM