Breaking News: Google adds Hindi to its translation service

At last Hindi has made it to Google's machine translation service that allows you to translate chunk of text or entire web pages from English to Hindi and vice-versa. It comes with another nice service that translates English Search strings in to Hindi and performs a Google search for you. Both the services are still very rusty and still distant from being usable at the moment. But it is a great start and Google deserves a pat on the back for this initiative which will surely boost use of Hindi on the web. More commendable is Google's willingness to improve this service, so if you find the translation poor or awry you can provide your suggestions right there. [Via]

Update: Almost a fortnight after we broke the story, Google official blog has the details on the new feature. Remember, you read the news first here :)

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Govt to launch 700cr National Translation Mission

To enable easy use of Hindi in Government offices the Commission for Scientific and Technical Terminology (CSTT) plans to launch a website that will auto-translate English words (we fail to understand though how will this help quick translation, but then this is GOI). Also on the anvil is an ambitious 700 cr "National Translation Mission" (don't get too excited, this is yet to be approved by the planning commission).

The 5 year mission is aimed at creating Hindi translation from famous works in English and other foreign languages with subject matter ranging from Economics to Geography, History and Science & Technology. CSTT claims to have created standard Hindi Terminology for about 9 lacs English words and 6 lacs words from Kannada, Konkani, Bodo and Oriya in its 37 year term.

Commendable work, but we wonder if it has found any real-world application. Yet for the sake of Hindi we hope CSTT succeeds. [Read the full story in Hindi]