Machine Translation/Transliteration as an integrating force for social communication

Man is a social animal, and the important characteristic of society is being together and communicating with each other for all day-to-day requirements. This communication takes place in one’s own language within a particular geographical location, but for this, the individual needs to know other’s language too. Thus, the individual needs to formulate his ideas in mind, create sentences in his own language and translate them into the host language for interaction. Present-day society mainly depends on spoken and written words rather than gestures and movements alone, and there also appears a need for transliteration of written material from one form to another. Thus, communication is completed only when the ideas of one group are shared with others using different media in a common format. It is an interesting view to look at our country and beyond from the perspective of language usage and the need for communication. India is a diverse country with 22 official languages, and many spoken/written languages/dialects. Beyond the boundaries of our nation, we come across many other spoken and written languages too. In the globalised society of the present era, there is a movement of not only the officials and heads of the states across the nations but there is frequent motion of individuals too. Officials and heads of state carry their translators, whereas individuals do not. It becomes difficult for individuals who land in new places with totally different languages to communicate. Moreover, the fanatics with old ideologies and self-centric cultural outlooks do not accept foreign languages and either misguide or do not respond to any concern of the visitor. There are occasions when the communal clashes have occurred due to language differences. When language is such a pricking, volatile issue then the social scientists and Information Communication Technology (ICT) professionals need to look into this matter seriously. The results of these serious thinking and efforts have yielded the advent of machine translation by the use of desktops, laptops or mobile phones. This is not only useful for the literate but even less literate persons are also using these facilities as the material is translated into language, voice etc. The present paper attempts to look into the use of machine translation as an integrating force for social communication from a layman’s perspective or the perspective of an educator. 

 Keywords: Translation, Transliteration, Machine Translation, communication