Close to three million scientific and technical terms in all modern Indian languages will soon be searchable via Google, enabling teachers, writers and translators as well as students to access such terminology when they need it in the course of their work.
Technical terms from disciplines like Linguistics, Public Policy, Finance, Agriculture and Engineering will also be available on the website — shabd.education.gov.nic — and will be launched as an app, too.. The domain for the website has been registered and it’s expected to become operational before the start of the next academic session.
The National Education Policy (NEP) advocates teaching in the mother tongue and local languages as far as possible. The NEP says that the promotion of Indian languages will be integrated into school and higher education at every level. In order to help students learn these languages, the availability of high quality learning materials in the form of workbooks, textbooks, videos, plays and novels is required. Moreover, the languages should have consistent updates of their vocabulary in the dictionary, so that students have access to the latest topics and issues.
The project is an initiative of the Commission for Scientific and Technical Terminology (CSTT) under the Ministry of Education.
“As of now, we are working on 22 official languages, but the ambit will be widened to include other Indian languages as well,” Professor Giri Nath Jha, Chairperson, CSTT, said.
Explaining that the digitisation mandate was vast as it included technical terms in the Sciences, Finance, Medicine, Linguistics, etc., in Hindi and all modern Indian languages, Prof. Jha said the website would provide a standardised vocabulary for reference which can be easily accessed on the Internet.
“The aim is to create an official vocabulary in Indian languages that can be accessible to all through a simple Google search,” he said.
Different committees are working simultaneously on the project and approximately three million translated technical words will be available on the website.
Subject-based committees are focused on finding the words for their areas of expertise while language committees are collating the “standard versions”. The words are being taken from dictionaries, glossaries and reference materials published by the CSTT over the years. The commission is being aided by the National Translation Mission of the Education Ministry’s Department of Higher Education.
CSTT, which was set up in 1961, publishes a large number of textbooks and monographs, apart from its quarterly journals, the Vigyan Garima Sindhu and Gyan Garima Sindhu. It also undertakes the publication of administrative and departmental glossaries that are widely used by various government departments, institutions, research laboratories, autonomous organisations and public sector undertakings, besides organising workshops, seminars, symposiums, conferences, and orientation and training programmes, to increase the use and popularise standard technical terminology in Hindi and other Indian languages.