The Karnataka High Court on Wednesday translated a webpage of its judgments and Supreme Court judgments from English into Kannada to provide access to the judgments in the regional language to the public in general and litigants in particular.
Chief Justice Prasanna B. Varale launched the webpage, which translated 169 selected high court judgments and 38 selected apex court judgments into Kannada, as the beginning of an outreach programme. The translated judgments can be accessed by visiting the ‘Judgments’ link on the High Court website – https://karnatakajudiciary.kar.nic.in/.
“The translation project is envisaged to translate selected judgments of the Supreme Court and High Courts in order to improve access to justice for all and to reach the general public in their own language and to facilitate understanding of judgments of Constitutional Courts overcome the barrier, which is in English,” said NG Dinesh, registrar (computers) of the high court.
AI-assisted
The project envisages Artificial Intelligence (AI) assisted translation of judicial records and judgments through ‘Supreme Court Legal Translation Software (SUVAS)’, an AI trained Machine Assisted Translation tool.
The implementation of the citizen-centric project is being implemented at the national level through an advisory committee constituted by the Supreme Court, comprising Justice Abhay Srinivasa Oka, a Supreme Court judge and former Chief Justice of the High Court, and Justice Suraj Govindaraj. , a judge of the High Court. At the state level, the High Court has constituted a committee comprising High Court judges Justice Krishna S Dixit and Justice CM Joshi to complete the translation work.
in-house translator
The translations are being done by the High Court’s in-house translators using the SUVAS tool, which verify the correctness of the machine translation and edit out mistakes, Mr Dinesh said, pointing out that the judgments in Kannada One of the objectives of translation is to impart legal literacy to the general public so that they can understand the law through judgments.
However, it is clarified in the webpage as a disclaimer that although reasonable efforts have been made to provide an accurate translation, the translated judgments are provided for general information only and shall have no legal effect for compliance and enforcement. Will not done.