With about 80 million Punjabis in Pakistan, about 20 million in India and some five million in various other countries, a new project for the translation of these two scripts will have far reaching benefits by breaking down the communications barrier to better understanding between the two neighbouring nations divided by misrepresentations, miscommunication and sheer lack of authentic information about each other.

Now this barrier has been breached by a new computer translation system available on the Internet. Developed by the Advanced Centre for Technical Development of Punjabi Language, Literature and Culture at Punjabi University in Patiala (Punjab), this system enables automatic translation of Gurmukhi into Shahmukhi and vice versa. Dr Gurpreet Singh Lehal, Professor and Head of the Computer Science Department at the university, has pioneered this project with one of his Ph.D. students and a systems analyst, Tejinder Singh Saini. The project aims to provide transliteration between the Gurmukhi, Shahmukhi, Devnagri and Roman scripts and 'Machine Translation Tools' for automatic translation from Punjabi to Hindi and vice versa. While Gurmukhi-Shahmukhi translation is possible now, translations into Hindi and Punjabi written in Roman script are under development.

Dr Lehal says, 'The Shahmukhi to Gurmukhi Transliteration system can transliterate any text in Shahmukhi (Urdu) script to Gurmukhi script with more than 93 per cent accuracy. The software can also transliterate any website from Shahmukhi script to Gurmukhi script. This will help in bringing closer the two Punjabs in East (Indian) and West (Pakistani), as Punjabis in India, who do not know the Urdu script, can now read the text by converting it to Gurmukhi. The Punjabi Hindi Machine Translation system can automatically translate Punjabi text to Hindi with more than 90 per cent accuracy.'

Tejinder Singh demonstrated this software when he went to the website of a Punjabi Journal, www.wichaar.com. He highlighted a news item, copied it into the programme and after a few minutes — lo and behold — the Shahmukhi or the Urdu script was translated into Gurmukhi script. Again, he went to the Urdu section of the BBC site and copied one of the breaking news items in Shahmukhi script and translated it into Gurmukhi in a couple of minutes. Just imagine what this programme can do to exchange authentic news and information in Punjabi across the Indo-Pakistan boundaries. Here is a sure way to get independent information — no matter what the two governments want to portray. No wonder Wichaar is facing a serious problem in Pakistan. It is randomly blocked and then unblocked, says Dr Manzur Ijaz from the United States.

Since the Internet has no borders, Punjabis living in any part of the globe can access any Indian or Pakistani Punjabi site for news or articles and get Shahmukhi-Gurmukhi translations to read the information either from India or Pakistan; or from any other country for that matter.

The project has developed a software package for transliteration from Shahmukhi to Gurmukhi languages and enabling web-based networking between East and West Punjab. It is based on ten years of academic research and literacy development in the United Kingdom, Pakistan and India. It aims to facilitate electronic and written communication between people in East and West Punjab through the development of a Punjabi Language Transliteration Tool to enhance networking between India and Pakistani Punjabis. The Punjabi media on the net stands to benefit the most       as news, articles and all other information can be freely translated from one script  to the other. Of course, schools and universities, writers and poets, NGOs and other organisations that provide information will all benefit   from this service.

Three Punjabi software systems developed by Punjabi University have been selected for demonstration at the prestigious 22nd International Conference on Computational Linguistics to be held in Manchester, UK, from 18-22 August 2009.

According to Dr Lehal, out of 612 submissions for oral, poster and demos only 12 working systems were selected for live demonstration. The Punjabi software packages selected for demonstration include the Shahmukhi to Gurmukhi Transliteration System, A Grammar Checking System for Punjabi and Punjabi to Hindi Machine Translation System. Thus, one can expect to use a similar software package for Urdu-Hindi translation, which is currently being tested. This will further break down the language barrier between India and Pakistan as most of North India uses Hindustani that has a great many Urdu words.

'This project has generated a great deal of interest in many countries from Australia to Canada,' says Dr Lehal. The Vice Chancellor of Punjabi University, Dr. Jaspal Singh, mentioned a recent experience when he visited Lahore to attend a seminar on the legendary Punjabi mystic Waris Shah. After he had referred to the latest research on Waris Shah in Punjab and especially at the Punjabi University, the participants at the conference said this new knowledge was not available to them. Dr Singh pointed out that all this and much more was easily available to them with this new software that translates Shahmukhi into Gurmukhi.

The internet has no borders; and now thanks to this software, Punjabi has no borders.

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