With Skype, technology to be India’s link language?

One of the most debilitating things for us Indians is that beyond using Hindi, and to a lesser extent English, to get by with our fellow countrymen with whom we don’t share a mother tongue, we don’t get to dip into each other’s regional cultures. Far too few translations are available for television programmes, movies or reading material for us to plug into a common pop cultural pool. Which is where Microsoft’s new Skype Translator could join Bollywood and cricket to bring all of us under one happy ‘India’ roof.

As of now, the software will allow real-time conversations between spoken English and Spanish. Soon, it will reportedly extend its facilities to other languages, Klingon and Drunkspeak included. At the cost of causing translators to fear for their jobs, the tiresome business of language politics — Hindi and English being hegemonic tools of communication and status respectively — may become redundant. A phrase like ‘Don’t hold your breath for the subtleties of Punjabi to be translated into Bengali’ will probably throw up gibberish.

But who knows, Skype Translator may become the ideal Babel-buster for folks to chat (and chat up) in Sanskrit and German, without either speaker having to know both the atishay-wunderbar languages. We just hope the software comes with non-twangy accents.