Reducing barriers of communication across Indian languages: An ai and es approach to mass media

The present paper identifies some nonlinguistic and linguistic barriers that will have to be overcome by any system for automatic and simultaneous communication of news, commercial advertisements, and other items of information and entertainment by mass media across some Indian languages. The paper also presents a brief account of some theories for the representation of knowledge of language in a language-independent manner, because such theories can make simultaneous communication of an item across different languages rather easy. But more research is required in this field before the relevant knowledge can be represented in a language-independent manner. Presently automatic and simultaneous communication of an item from any language to many other languages does not seem easy. However, it seems that in a very limited way a beginning can be made in the direction of such communication by human editors aided by tools developed by computer scientists so far. © 1994 the Indian Academy of Sciences.