CHENNAI: The University of Madras aims to bring back glory to its regional language departments and attract more students to these courses by ensuring job opportunities. During the pandemic, digitalisation in every sector got a major boost and consumption of content in regional languages have increased manifold.
According to varsity officials, the university is trying to encash in on the opportunity by providing consultancy services to corporate and IT companies. The university is currently trying to identify the companies which are working in language-related space and will thereafter approach them to get projects from them.
Vice-chancellor of the university, S Gowri said Covid has catapulted India’s adoption of digital significantly. Digitisation is now in every place and people from rural areas have started using online services and consumption of regional content is more than ever.
“Companies are trying their best to translate their English content into regional languages so that they can widen their reach. And I see this as an opportunity for our students. We are trying to provide consultancy services to some companies for translating their content from English to the south Indian languages,” said Gowri.
The university offers bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English, Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, Arabic, Urdu, Sanskrit languages. Apart from Tamil, all other departments have a poor turnout of students.
Officials said India’s local language needs are in demand as many companies are working in language services and outright new solutions and these startups are getting good funding also. “With the help of artificial intelligence (AI), the startups are translating English content to regional languages. Our regional language students can help these companies in creating better and accurate content,” said a faculty of the Tamil department. The varsity also has plans to make changes in the syllabus on basis of the feedback from the corporate sector to make the students more market-ready.