21st January 2025, Kathmandu
A meeting with stakeholders took place for the Project “Empowering Information Access Rights: Developing a Trilingual Machine Translation System for English, Nepali, and Tamang” at Kathmandu University School of Management, Bal Kumari, Lalitpur on Jan 20, 2025.
Kathmandu University Trilingual MT Project
The meeting was convened by the Information and Language Processing Research Lab, Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Kathmandu University, to mark the kickoff of the year-long Research Project on Trilingual Machine Translation for English-Nepali-Tamang language pairs, funded by Google under the prestigious Academic Research Award (ARA).
Prof. Dr. Bal Krishna Bal, who is the Principal Investigator (PI) of the Project and leads the Information and Language Processing Research Lab at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Kathmandu University, gave an overview of the Project in which he mentioned that the Trilingual Machine Translation System can bridge the lack of information access due to the language barrier and can benefit the larger mass of Nepali and Tamang speakers with a large body of knowledge from the internet which is largely in the English language. “Additionally, such a system will help foster increased dialogue and social harmony between the language communities in the context of the country’s federal structure and certain languages being declared official working languages per province,” he remarked.
“One special characteristic of the Project is that it will involve the community and the relevant stakeholders in all the stages of the Project – right from inception, design, development, testing and deployment. This will create a sense of ownership of the Project in the community and make the technology more acceptable”, added co-Principal investigator, Prof. Dr. Balaram Prasain, Tribhuvan University.
Professor Bal ended the project briefing by asking the different stakeholders present in the meeting to support their respective ends in developing a scalable Machine Translation Framework that could easily incorporate the numerous languages spoken in Nepal besides Nepali and Tamang, which fall in the current scope of the one-year Project.
The participants in the meeting were from different backgrounds, namely the technical (academia, research, linguistics, software localization, artificial intelligence), community (language activists, journalists, writers, editors, social scientists, anthropologists), government (federal, provincial, local level) and actively took part in the discussion regarding the domains (General Communication, Education, Health, Agriculture, Tourism) the current project needs to focus on in terms of gathering the parallel and monolingual corpora (large collections of texts), a pre-requisite for the development of technology.
For more: Kathmandu University Trilingual MT Project