HYDERABAD: A group of city-based software engineers recently won the Bhashini Grand Innovation Challenge instituted by the ministry of electronics and information technology for the year 2024 for their innovation in the language translation platform for digitisation and translation.
Pawan Kumar, Sanket Kumar Pathak and Rashi Ahmad, former colleagues, came together to launch the eBhasha Setu, a language processing technology services company for Indian languages at the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE) at IIIT-H, around eight years back, out of the sheer will to make the information available in the Indian languages for ease of access and availability.
At present, eBhasha Setu has four language services platforms for multiple functions such as - Transzaar which is an end-to-end translation management system, Videozaar - a platform for video-to-video translation, Webzaar - a platform for website localisation and Avataar - a digitisation and translation platform that involves optical character recognition.
The startup won the Bhashini Grand Innovation Challenge bagging Rs 25 lakh and a contract with the government for translation and digitisation of records in 10 Indian languages for the Avataar platform, which provides OCR and translation solution. The team believes that knowledge must be made accessible and understandable for all and thus they employed the Natural Language Processing (NLP), a machine learning technology to build products for various roles of translation and digitization.
Speaking to TNIE, Pawan Kumar, co-founder, eBhasha Setu, said: “We believe that in terms of translation, trust is a very important factor. Therefore, building a platform which can achieve the maximum level of accuracy, of course with added human intervention, could make a significant contribution to the content industry. In addition, our focus was also to enhance productivity and turnaround time for organisations and individuals, who come with a varied range of requirements for translation and provide the best possible solutions to them”.
Pawan further said that the platforms were typically designed for large volume tasks with multiple lingual translations, especially for government offices, law firms, accountants, hospitals and other workplaces which involved humongous data in physical form.
Work was also being done for enhanced indexing for speedy and accurate search results. As of date the Bhashini supports 22 languages, including Hindi, Marathi, English, and others.
Rashid Ahmad, CEO and Co-founder of eBhasha Setu told TNIE, “Our goal is that we can make books, academic textbooks, and other content widely and easily available for readers, unlike the challenge that I personally faced due to my lack of knowledge of English language. Going forward, we are planning to make the platform services available on subscription basis so that the services can become more available”.