Soon, watch the match in language of your choice

Mumbai: If Navjot Singh Sidhu’s aphorisms — ‘he played that like a dwarf at a urinal’ — leave you concerned about the fate of the ball, fret not, relief is on the way.Pune-headquartered Centre for Advanced Computing (C-DAC), the R&D cell of Department of Information Technology (DIT), has developed a fully-automated translating and subtitling suite for relaying scores and commentary in 22 official Indian languages. C-DAC is eying the upcoming Commonwealth Games to launch the Digital Video Broadcast (DVB) technology, which will allow television viewers to select a language of their choice while watching a live programme.

While the text subtitling will be ready before the Games being held later this year, the real-time voice translation service will take a few more months hence to release. “Until now, videos with subtitles had to be stored onto the tapes before transmission. But now, on-the-fly subtitle overlaying can be done by any television channel, as the suite is fixed to the broadcasters’ main server,” said Mahesh Kulkarni, programme coordinator of Graphic Intelligence Based Script Technology (Gist), the group at C-DAC which works on multilingual computing tools.