Source: PIB and NTM website
About the National Translation Mission
- It was launched in 2008
- National Translation Mission (NTM) is a Government of India scheme to establish translation as an industry in general and, to facilitate higher education by making knowledge texts accessible to students and academics in Indian languages in particular.
- The vision of NTM is to create a knowledge society by transcending language barriers.
- NTM aims to disseminate knowledge in all Indian languages listed in the VIII schedule of the Constitution through translation. NTM also aims to open up the vast body of knowledge by translating the higher education texts, available mostly in English, into Indian languages. It is expected that this process will eventually pave the way for the constitution of an inclusive knowledge society.
- The scheme is being implemented through the Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL), Mysore to establish translation as an industry in general and to facilitate higher education by making knowledge texts accessible to students and academics in Indian languages.
- Under the mission a combination of efforts is made to orient translators, encourage publishers to publish translations, maintain databases of published translations from, into and between Indian languages and to become a clearing house of information on translation.
Mission’s long-term goals would be to:
- Provide support for research and development on software for translation memory, word-finders, word net etc.
- Offer fellowships & grants for Natural Language Processing and translation related research projects.
- Provide grants to Universities/Departments conducting Degree/Diploma courses on translation, for specific projects such as preparation of translation manuals between pairs of languages
- Support journals on translation or publishing translation-related texts and analysis etc in Indian languages
- Lend visibility to translators and translation activities by organizing events like book launches for translations, regional translation festivals, discussions, book exhibitions, etc.
- Build a reservoir of serious academic works on Translation Studies and thus facilitate discourses on the same.
- Establish translation as a viable profession and give rise to a translation industry.
- Beneficiaries: NTM aims at the formation of an inclusive knowledge society. The mission seeks to promote equal distribution of knowledge by facilitating translation of seminal texts from one language to another. This, in turn will equip students who find it difficult to access knowledge because of a language barrier. NTM also aims to benefit a large number of people cutting across various walks of life.
- Teachers of various subjects at various levels
- Authors/Translators/ Publishers.
- Departments of Translation Studies, Linguistics and researchers from various universities and institutions
- Publishers in Indian languages looking for new and interesting ventures
- Translation software developers,
- Scholars of Comparative literature.
- Readers looking for literary and knowledge texts in their own languages
- Volunteers engaged in providing non-formal education
- NGOs working on public health, civil rights, environment, popular science etc.
- Government and private agencies and individuals looking for interpreters
- Film producers looking for subtitles and multilingual releases
- FM and other radio houses who need to air programmes in different languages
- Translation of books: Under the scheme, the books of knowledge texts mostly text books of various subjects prescribed in Universities and Colleges are being translated in all Languages of the 8th Schedule of the Constitution of India
- National Translation Mission has so far published 40 Knowledge Text translations in 16 languages in collaboration with Pearson Education, India
