Kshanakalam Animutyam, Telugu translation of the Kannada book “Kshana Hottu Animuttu” has been released at the Golden Threshold, Abids, Nampally Station Road, Hyderabad on 15 December 2018. The author of the original Kannada book, Sri S. Shadakshari was the chief guest. The book has been translated using “the saara Translator”, a Machine Translation system developed by Prof. Kavi Narayana Murthy and his team at School of Computer and Information Sciences, University of Hyderabad (UoH). The book has been critically edited by Dr. Pammi Pavan Kumar from Department of Telugu, University of Hyderabad.
Prof. Kavi Narayana Murthy, spoke about machine translation and its importance. He introduced “the saara translator” and gave a live demo. They developed another system called “The saara Machine Translation Development Framework”, meant for developing high quality translation systems in less time. He said that machine translation systems save time, effort and money. In the demo, he showed how fast the system can translate. He showed a few examples of translation given by the system which are of good quality. They can also be edited by human translators if necessary. Prof. Murthy further said that the goal of their system is to reduce manual effort over the time while increasing the machine performance. For this, the system uses Artificial Intelligence at the backend.
Sri S. Shadakshari thanked Prof. K Narayana Murthy, Dr. Pammi Pavan Kumar, both from UoH and Prof. Rajashekara Murthy, RV College of Engineering Bangalore for choosing his book for translation. He said that he is extremely honoured for this.
Dr. Pammi Pavan Kumar spoke about his experience in critically editing the book. He said that he went through a pleasurable experience in doing the editing, when compared to other machine translation systems he has worked with before.
Prof Appa Rao Podile, Vice Chancellor, University of Hyderabad has presided over the event. He congratulated Prof. K Narayana Murthy and his team for the success. He hoped that these machine translations can benefit the society as many books in other languages can now be translated into Telugu at a faster speed.