Bridging The Language Gap Digitally

The Web does not just connect machines, it connects people," said Tim Berners-Lee. The language barriers affect how people in a community or outside the community interact. Technology has played a role in translation for a while now, and is constantly evolving as new technologies, such as neural machine translation (NMT) and automatic speech recognition, have emerged. In an interview with BW Businessworld, Arvind Pani, Co-founder & CEO, Reverie Language Technologies, explains how important is localisation of languages in a country like India and more

How is Reverie helping businesses in India?
For over a decade, Reverie Language Technologies has been offering cutting-edge, end-to-end Indic language solutions to both government & enterprises. We aim to democratize India’s Internet and have  built state-of-the-art, AI based, language technology solutions exclusively for Indian languages. This is backed with our deep understanding of Indian languages.

We are leading the way for businesses to engage with users in their languages. We are focussed to bring Language Equality on the Internet, which would help the Indian language users, navigate the internet with the same ease as an English user. Being the only full-stack Indian language product company using intuitive technologies, we have offerings to address the entire spectrum of users’ digital journey.

Why is language localization important for a country like India?
The dialect spoken in India changes every 40 kms and 122 languages are spoken by more than 10,000 people. We have 1.3BN Indians speak and comprehend from the 22 officially recognized languages and 720 dialects. India will also experience 536 million language first users by 2021.

There are manifold benefits of adopting language localization, but first it is important to iterate that fundamental rights in Indian constitution can't be exercised by citizens, without the fundamental right to choose their preferred language. In the digital first mode, forcing English on everyone is also a violation of an individual's fundamental rights.

Localization of digital platforms in Indian languages can provide easy access for a larger set of people. It can generate employment opportunities, access to information for the masses. It can enable sales and loyalty from customers who trust content in their language.

Can you talk to us about the new product that you’ve launched ‘Prabandhak’?
Our latest offering Prabandhak caters to Language Service Providers (LSPs), individual translators and enterprises/other businesses. The USD 500 million Indic language translation industry is poised to grow at 20% to 30% per annum.

Besides translation can be an arduous task that requires a lot of time as one needs to get the meaning and cultural sensitivities right when translating. Currently, the Indian language translation industry is largely unorganized. There is a growing need for digital Indic content to reach out to over 536 million users.

This current growth in demand for Indian language content will require Individual translators, Language Service Providers (LSPs) and enterprises to rapidly scale up their translation and localization efforts.

With Prabandhak, LSPs, large enterprises and individual translators can:

Bring order to the unorganized Indic Language Industry by bringing all stakeholders on one platform.

Beat the Unpredictability in Turnaround Time (TAT), cost and quality

Translate large volume of content in real-time with ease and within a much shorter time frame.

Improve productivity and enable them to deliver projects up to 4 times faster by automating the translation.

Enhance accuracy by quickly proofreading the drafts, thus helping them finish projects well ahead of the delivery time.

Prabandhak also has features such as an in-built marketplace that enables businesses and individual translators/LSPs to discover and interact with each other in real-time depending on the set budget, quality and time expectations.

There is also a ‘’Auto Recompile” feature that allows you to keep the translated document identical to source documents, which helps in minimizing cost and TAT involved in DTP (Desktop publishing).

Also, can you tell us about Anuvadak and how it can help businesses?
Traditionally website localisation and content management in Indian language comprises of these five processes that are time consuming:
·        Extracting content from the source English website.
·        Maintaining an excel sheet of all the English content which needs to be converted.
·        Deploying and hosting websites in each Indian language on different servers.
·        Once the website is hosted, the localised content needs to be updated in each of the individual websites.
·        Going live with these multilingual websites and managing SEO for each website.

Anuvadak as a platform automates repetitive tasks involved in translating, hosting, and scaling content for localized websites. Managing localized content, website, and tracking the progress is made seamless via a simple user dashboard. This platform can decrease the time taken to go live by 40% and save content management costs by about 60%.

Anuvadak keeps a track of the original English content and highlights changes for translations automatically, on its dashboard. The same can be easily translated via either machine translation or humans and pushed back. The content is automatically published and updated into the multilingual website, while also ensuring SEO compatibility in Indian languages. It is an easy to use platform that has been created keeping the business user in mind and it takes away the technical complexities in localising a website.