On translation and AI

This article on Baidu and it's bet on AI sparked a thought in my head. Well, the thought was to basically copy what Baidu is doing in China and do the same in India. I wrote earlier on the language barrier in India and how AI can help solve the problem.

The crux of what Baidu is doing in China is to employ a bunch of people to translate English technical documents to Chinese (Mandarin prolly). By doing so, not only is the industry able to communicate with Chinese customers better, Baidu now has a big database of English-Chinese (Mandarin) translations.

Don't you think doing the same with Indian languages would be awesome? Instead of hackathons and docathons, we could have translate-athons (?) where volunteers could translate documents into the numerous Indian languages and in the process, help in compiling an impressive English-Indian language dataset, a dataset that can now be used to train AI to better translate between English and Indian languages and maybe even between two Indian languages.

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