Knowledge Without Language Barriers
India’s language diversity creates barriers for its vast citizenry to understand one another. A skilful farmer in Rajasthan cannot share insights with a farmer in Karnataka. They simply may not have a common language.
Beyond the common person, even the highly trained cannot access ideas written in languages they can’t read. Many of India’s scholarly works were written in classical languages that most people do not understand today, such as Sanskrit, Prakrit and Pali.
Therefore, most of us are unable to read and benefit from a vast array of scholarly works that India has produced.
This is very unfortunate. Personally, I regret that I am unable to read and understand Sanskrit texts.
Yet, with the use of technology, it should be possible to search for ideas in one language and get results from texts written in a completely different language. This would make all knowledge useful to everyone, irrespective of their language training.
I am curious whether this is possible with existing technology or newer tools like LLMs.
But I can’t be sure.