A Survey on the Machine Translation Methods for Indian Languages: Challenges, Availability, and Production of Parallel Corpora, Government Policies and Research Directions

Abstract

Since 1991, machine translation has been a prominent research area in India, with IIT Kanpur pioneering the original work which has since been expanded to several universities. Only 10 percent of India’s 1.3 billion inhabitants can read, write and speak, English with varying degrees of competence, which makes machine translation crucial in overcoming the linguistic barrier. The Indian market for commercial products and events is greatly influenced by local languages, making the development and translation of region-based content an essential research topic nowadays. Several government-sponsored projects are being undertaken in this regard. However, there are limited sentence-aligned parallel bi-text resources available for the majority of Indian language pairs. This paper presents a detailed survey of the current trends of research on machine translation between Indian languages, along with their challenges over time. It also presents a timeline of recent research conducted and the key findings of past surveys conducted over a decade. Under a single canopy, this paper provides sources of data, the progress made in developing datasets for low-resource Indian languages and finally, new research directions.