Vice President M Venkaiah Naidu on Thursday said making information and knowledge available to people in their own languages and dialects becomes extremely important in a country that is as diverse, as complex and as multi lingual as India.

Addressing the gathering at the demonstration of the machine language translation software Saara in Hyderabad, Naidu said that it is mandatory that we remove the barriers which people face to access information and technology if we wish to educate and empower our citizens.

In this context, he highlighted the importance of translation initiatives likes Saara, reasoning that translation facilitates communication, exchange of ideas and information. ‘It enriches languages and literature and brings the world together’, he said.

Hw lauded the central university of Hyderabad for coming out with SAARA and said it was a good beginning.

Talking about the importance of native languages, Naidu opined that Promotion of mother tongue was vital for cultural advancement. He said softwares like SAARA help people aquire the best of translated versions.

Dwelling upon the efficiency and cost effectiveness of machine translation systems, the Vice President observed that machines were not static, that they were capable of adapting, evolving, learning new things, making their predictions and decision making much more accurate.

Acknowledging the fact that developing high performance machine translation systems remains a big challenge to this date, the Vice President said that moving from laboratory models to practically usable and deployable systems has not been easy.

Terming Artificial Intelligence, as the technology of the future, Naidu congratulated the Saara team for the adoption of this cutting edge technology. He expressed hope that high quality translation systems will be developed for many language pairs over the next few years.

Speaking of the great linguistic diversity that existed in India in the form of more than 19,500 raw mother tongues, he emphasized upon the importance of protecting and conserving India’s linguistic heritage. ‘Our languages are a crucial part of who we are, our history and our evolution as a society’, he added.