The Maharashtra government recently sanctioned over ₹6 lakh to purchase a software for translation of the Supreme Court and Bombay High Court judgments from English into Marathi.
On August 1, the Eknath Shinde-led Maharashtra government passed a resolution that states a budget of ₹6,47,320 had been approved and cleared for purchasing Microsoft family software and Google Translator.
The Artificial Intelligence Assistant Legal Translation Committee requested the State government to provide the necessary software for the same.
Translators and interpreters
The government also approved the creation of 300 posts for junior translators and interpreters at the High Court appellate branch. The High Court has also taken the initiative to translate English judgments into Marathi in March 2023.
The resolution has mentioned, “The translators will be paid ₹100 per page and they can be hired through an external mechanism from a pool of retired judicial officers, advocates recommended by the Bar Council of Maharashtra & Goa and universities, including law students, teachers and experts.”
On March 2, 2023, the Bombay High Court website dedicated a separate section called “Nivadak Nirnay’‘ (selected judgments) on the homepage of the website. As of Wednesday, over 50 judgments have been uploaded on the website delivered by the principal Bench of the Bombay High Court and Nagpur and Aurangabad Bench of the High Court.
Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud on August 15 said the Supreme Court had translated 9,423 of its judgments from English into 14 regional languages. Four of the judgments have even been translated into Nepali. The highest number of judgments, 8,977, have been translated into Hindi followed by Tamil at 128. Gujarati has cornered the third spot at 86 while Malayalam and Odia share the fourth spot at 50 each.
