Two judgments of the Kerala High Court were recently translated into Malayalam and published on the court website, making the court the first such in the country to publish its orders in a regional language.
- Coinciding with the International Mother Language Day on February 21, translated versions of two judgments have been uploaded in the court’s website.
- The judgments were passed by a Division Bench consisting of Chief Justice S. Manikumar and Justice Shaji P. Chaly. The orders published in Malayalam came in cases related to a vehicle purchase loan and one connected to the construction of a check-dam at Koodaranji panchayat.
SUVAS
- The Malayalam version of judgments can be accessed by searching the ‘case status’ using the case number, party name, advocate name, etc on the HC’s official website, hckerala.gov.in.
- The Supreme Court had developed a dedicated open-source judicial domain language translation tool named SUVAS (Supreme Court Vidhik Anuvaad Software) to translate judicial documents from English to nine vernacular languages — Marathi, Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Punjabi, Gujarati, Malayalam and Bengali — and vice versa.
- Kerala High Court is translating the judgment using SUVAS which is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) based tool.
- Kiren Rijiju, Union Minister for Law and Justice, later tweeted that the inspiring example set by the High Court will empower citizens, particularly at the grassroots-level, by making judgments more accessible in their language. “Let’s celebrate this historic step towards language empowerment,” he tweeted.
