Multilingual Computing for Indian Languages - An Overview

Abstract

While English has predominantly maintained its lead both as the lingua franca of the Internet and also for basic man-machine interactions, the need of the day is a system that can cater to the native by facilitating such communication in the language he is most comfortable. This calls for the realization of Multilingual Systems that can present the same information in a variety of languages. The term Multilingual Computing in the present context refers to systems that are capable of running programs that accept, process and present data in more than one natural language. The concerned language for interacting with the computer may be selected at the time of invocation or use of the program. Such multilingual systems do not fully overcome the man machine barrier. The user still has to comprehend and react to the cryptic messages presented in the language of his choice. The problem can be overcome only by the use of natural language processing systems that can translate user commands and queries in his native language to machine level commands, facilitate execution and present the results in a manner that is very akin to the responses of a human being. This paper discusses the basic issues in the formulation of such multilingual systems.