Evaluation of Plan Schemes of the Department of Official Language

The need for the package arises from the fact that under the Official
Language Act all central government resolutions, General Orders, Rules,
Notifications, Administrative & other Reports, Press Communiqués, Official
Papers, Contracts, Agreements, Licenses, Permits, Tender Notices and
Forms of Tender should be made available both in English and Hindi. The
magnitudes involved are therefore enormous. The Central Translation
Bureau has a capacity to translate only 46,000 standard pages per year. It
still has a backlog, which is being cleared by outsourcing. Various
departments have Hindi-Officers and Hindi Translators and other employees
engaged in translation work. To put matters in perspective, the following
observation by an advisor of the Planning Commission is worth quoting:
“While preparing the bilingual version of the Fifth Pay Commission Report,
we had to deploy 53 translators for over six months.” Various ministries,
courts, public enterprises and other public bodies create hundreds and
thousands of pages of documents almost everyday which are expected to
be bilingual.
The task of translation of official documents involves translation of
very large number of technical terms that are domain specific. For example,
an ex-Chairman of the Commission for Scientific and Technical Terminology
(CSTT) noted: “ We have evolved 500 thousand English-Hindi technical
terms, of which twelve thousand belong to administration.” The attempt by
C-DAC therefore has been to develop MANTRA domain by domain. During
2005-06, MANTRA for the domains of agriculture and small industries were
developed and the following year this was extended to Information
Technology. Currently the software also covers the domains of
administration, finance and health care.
The technical features include interactive Graphical User Interface,
which is a basic requirement for user friendliness. It takes in English
documents either in the soft form or through scanning and OCR. The
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