Challenges in Translating Technical Lectures: Insights from the NPTEL

Abstract

This study examines the practical applications and methodological implications of Machine Translation in Indian Languages, specifically Bangla, Malayalam, and Telugu, within emerging translation workflows and in relation to existing evaluation frameworks. The choice of languages prioritized in this study is motivated by a triangulation of linguistic diversity, which illustrates the significance of multilingual accommodation of educational technology under NEP 2020. This is further supported by the largest MOOC portal, i.e., NPTEL, which has served as a corpus to facilitate the arguments presented in this paper. The curation of a spontaneous speech corpora that accounts for lucid delivery of technical concepts, considering the retention of suitable register and lexical choices are crucial in a diverse country like India. The findings of this study highlight metric-specific sensitivity and the challenges of morphologically rich and semantically compact features when tested against surface overlapping metrics.