Madras university will soon bring out a multilingual dictionary on seven Indian languages to promote cross-cultural relations. The dictionary is aimed at making languages from the south more accessible in other parts of the country. The Multi-Lingual Dictionary of Indian Languages Project funded by the University Grants Commission (UGC) is a joint venture by the seven language departments of the Oriental Research Institute (ORI), one of the university’s premier wings. The five-volume dictionary will comprehensively cover language and literature, art and culture, science and technology, administration and law, and, flora and fauna. [Read the full story]
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Debashish
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Debashish
Image from WikipediaStian, who blogs on education, was delighted to find free course ware of NCERT on the web in English, Hindi and Urdu. The material is available in PDF format. Stian opines :
Sphere: Related ContentThere are all kinds of reasons to applaud this. As a student of Hindi, I love reading the readers made for the initial grades (with beautiful illustrations!), and as I move up, I can use the texts in parallel, reading the Hindi and checking with the English that I understood. Just like I suggested that the huge amount of Open Course Ware films of classroom lectures from all around the world, especially China and India, might be a gigantic boon to a comparative curriculum researcher, these text books would also be great for someone studying curriculum and pedagogics in India.
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Debashish
Some schools in the US have decided to introduce Hindi as a foreign language with staples like French, Spanish and German. “We’re going to teach our kids how to speak important languages. We will welcome teachers here to help teach our kids how to speak languages,” US President George Bush had said during a National Security Language Initiative in New York.
With an initial budget of $114 million, this initiative aims at helping more Americans to become multilingual. Arabic, Mandarin, Russian, Persian and Hindi are all “important languages”. Instructors are being recruited to teach these from kindergarten right up to the university level. In India, the recruitment process is being facilitated by an arm of the human resources development ministry, called EdCIL (Education Consultants India Limited). [Read full story]
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Debashish
To enable easy use of Hindi in Government offices the Commission for Scientific and Technical Terminology (CSTT) plans to launch a website that will auto-translate English words (we fail to understand though how will this help quick translation, but then this is GOI). Also on the anvil is an ambitious 700 cr “National Translation Mission” (don’t get too excited, this is yet to be approved by the planning commission).
The 5 year mission is aimed at creating Hindi translation from famous works in English and other foreign languages with subject matter ranging from Economics to Geography, History and Science & Technology. CSTT claims to have created standard Hindi Terminology for about 9 lacs English words and 6 lacs words from Kannada, Konkani, Bodo and Oriya in its 37 year term.
Commendable work, but we wonder if it has found any real-world application. Yet for the sake of Hindi we hope CSTT succeeds. [Read the full story in Hindi]
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