The Kerala High Court became the first High Court in the country to publish two of its most recent decisions in Malayalam, the native language, on February 21, International Mother Language Day. The Kerala High Court released two of its most recent rulings in Malayalam. It is quickly making history by publishing rulings in local dialects as the first high court in the nation. Just below the English version of the judgments, the court posted the Malayalam versions online.
Two decisions were made by the division bench, which included Chief Justice S. Manikumar and Justice. Shaji P. Chaly. There has been an effort by the executive and the judiciary to publish decisions of High Courts and Supreme Courts in regional languages since Chief Justice of India, D.Y. Chandrachud, assumed office in November 2022.
This new development comes a day after the Supreme Court began testing a live transcription service to record its hearings using artificial intelligence (AI). Additionally, they use NLP-based technology. The facility is used in the courtroom of Chief Justice of India D Y Chandrachud, who presides over a Constitution bench and hears the constitutional crisis in Maharashtra.
The Supreme Court established a committee for artificial intelligence to create a specific open-source judicial domain language. The software used to translate decisions from vernacular to English is SUVAS (Supreme Court Vidhik Anuwad Software). The judgments were translated by the Kerala High Court using this tool. On Republic Day, 1,091 rulings from the supreme court were made available in regional languages, including Odia, Garo, and others, as a first step.
The Chief Justice of India, D.Y. Chandrachud, announced in January this year that the Supreme Court’s rulings would be translated into four languages: Hindi, Gujarati, Odia, and Tamil, after observing that 99.9% of Indian citizens could not understand English.
CJI Justice DY Chandrachud mentioned the need to work toward making SC rulings available in regional languages at a recent event. He also advocated using technology to accomplish it. The children will benefit from it.
International Mother Language Day, observed annually on February 21, encourages multilingualism and raises awareness of linguistic and cultural diversity.
On Republic Day this year, the supreme court suggested releasing 1,268 of its decisions in 13 Indian languages. Of those, 1,091 judgments had been translated into Hindi, 21 into Odia, 14 into Marathi, four into Assamese, one into Garo, 17 into Kannada, one into Khasi, 29 into Malayalam, three into Nepali, four into Punjabi, 52 into Tamil, 28 into Telugu, and three into Urdu.
Vernacular Judgements is a separate tab on the Supreme Court portal where the apex court began uploading decisions in regional languages by July 2019. The verdicts of cases coming from a particular state were seen to be translated into that state’s language, and translated verdicts in six regional tongues were seen to be made available. In addition, it was noted that some other judgments in Malayalam, Tamil, and Hindi would be made available by 2020.
