Target Beneficiaries

There is a range of target beneficiaries for the Mission, but the first and foremost are the weaker sections of students from the margins of the society, who, owing to their location as well as background – physical (mainly rural and semi-urban areas) as well as social – esp. being from disadvantaged caste or class, have very little or no access to knowledge of Technical and Scientific in nature which is available mostly in English. The Mission will attain its true objective only if and when the translated texts from diverse disciplines reach these seekers of knowledge from the marginalized sections of our society.

However in the process of reaching out, lateral benefits go to a large number of groups, such as:
1. The general public eager to read literary and knowledge texts in their own languages.
2. Translators who come to be employed in large numbers and are given reasonable remuneration for their work.
3. Publishers who are on the look out for new and interesting books in the languages.
4. Teachers in regular teaching in schools, colleges and universities.
5. Volunteers engaged in non-formal education.
6. NGOs working in areas like public health, civil rights, environment, popularization of science etc.
7. Agencies looking for interpreters.
8. Tourists and foreign scholars who need interpreting.
9. Film makers, producers and propagators eager to have the films subtitled.
10. Radio and TV programme producers who wish to have their programmes aired in different languages.
11. Translation trainees.
12. Departments of translation in universities and other translation institutions.
13. Researchers in various fields related to translation.
14. Translation software developers.
15. Comparative literature scholars.

To kick-start quality translation industry, it is proposed to enhance the 'National Register for Translators' that was floated on the Anukriti web site, and done earlier in print form by Sahitya Akademi. Along with that, would also like to involve all Translators' Associations (there are several at the moment in the country) as well as the pool of translators from the Private Publishing Houses. The entire activity will have to be managed very professionally, also to provide services to those Government and other agencies that need a quick time-bound translation of certain texts. Besides these, holding of 'Anuvaad Melaa' (Translation Fairs and related sensitization activities even in small towns) and organizing 'Professional Translators' Training Programmes' should help in generation and identification of appropriate manpower. We hope this approach will result in a large translation industry.

In order to bring in the maximum benefit to the common people, and also because the knowledge-based texts will be needed to meet the demands of our teaching and research institutions, the printed books would be priced moderately but for those who would like to access the translations. All such texts would be made available as e-book free of cost through a large networked web-site to be hosted and managed by the NTM from the CIIL's server. Only a register of users will be maintained so that there is a record of our end-users of net based texts. This will also enable us to get their feedback. Lastly, the translation tools generated such as the dictionaries, thesauri, word-finders, concordances, etymological dictionaries, visual and audio dictionaries etc will be all made available and updated as open-source packages.

The NTM will prioritize creation of digital dictionaries and 'Machine-Aided Translation Software’ among different language pairs. But since the IITs and universities, IIITs, TIFR and IISc together as well as many large software giants have been working on the tough problem of Machine Translation (MT) for the last two decades, and the results have not been high-end error-free tools so far. Therefore, while the NTM will emphasize on this area cautiously. Certain parts of this recommendations are going to be implemented earlier (like digital dictionaries, word finders, thesauri etc) than certain others (such as automated tools).