Machine Translation System for Hindi-Dogri Language Pair

The rise and dominance of Information Technology in urban areas has created a gap between urban and rural India, and this gap is referred as the Digital Divide. The need of the hour is to bridge this gap. The various factors responsible for this divide as studied in the literature review of Digital Divide are: the language barrier, cost factor, technology awareness, lack of resources etc. To study the factors responsible for the digital divide in Jammu region, a pilot survey was conducted which revealed many factors to be same as those found in the literature survey, language being one of the major factors responsible for this divide. Many initiatives have been taken by the government to bridge this divide i.e. costs of computing have been cut down, computer facilities have been provided and a lot of work has been done even in the language field. In today´s time, the web supports multilingualism. English is not the only language supported by computers today. In the state of Jammu and Kashmir, languages are majorly spoken arey: Urdu, Kashmiri, Hindi and Dogri. Machine Translation systems for translating Hindi and English text to Urdu are available, Kashmir University is working on the development of translation tools for Dogri, but no work of translation is done for the Dogri language. This paper discusses the various phases in the development of Machine Translation System for the Hindi-Dogri language pair. The organization of the paper is as follows: The section I gives a brief introduction to Machine Translation and the various approaches of machine translation, section II, explains in brief the phases in the translation of Hindi language to Dogri language. For the transliteration of Hindi text IAST is used.