Recruitments to translation: Engg colleges prepare for courses in regional languages

AICTE IS INITIALLY TRANSLATING BOOKS IN HINDI, MARATHI, BENGALI, TAMIL AND TELUGU LANGUAGES

NEW DELHI: Keeping in tune with the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, engineering colleges have started recruiting new faculty, identifying those who are fluent in regional languages, translations of existing curriculum and preparations to write new books ahead of upcoming session of the first batch of Btech students in regional languages in October.

In July, the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) had for the first time granted permission to 14 colleges across the country to offer select engineering courses in 11 regional languages, mainly Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Gujarati, Malayalam,

Assamese, Punjabi and Oriya. However, this year, eight of these 14 colleges will offer Btech courses in Hindi.

Others will provide the option of pursuing technical education in Marathi, Bengali, Tamil and Telugu.

To meet the requirement of the upcoming session, the AICTE is initially translating books applicable for the first year students in these five languages only, officials familiar with the matter said.

According to information shared by AICTE, books of chemistry, programming, electronic graphic and design, basic electrical engineering, and workshop manufacturing practices, have already been translated to five languages.

The translation work for Physics and Mathematics books has been completed in all regional languages excluding Telugu and Bengali, respectively. Officials said the work is expected to be completed by the end of this month.

The council has also translated several Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCS), free online courses, and 2,531 online lectures available on the government’s SWAYAM portal.

“The translation work has been carried out by our faculty from Aicte-approved institutes having expertise in the subject as well as in the languages. In order to maintain quality of translation, translated transcripts are evaluated or corrected by more senior faculty who possess deep knowledge of the subject and language. We have also ensured to retain the technical terms and scientific words in English only since many regional languages do not have substitutes for them. Besides, the colleges continue to teach English as a language subject,” AICTE chairperson Anil Dattatraya Sahasrabudhe said.

At most of the colleges HT contacted, officials said that identifying and recruiting teachers who are fluent in the particular language was the first task at hand.