It was one of the most challenging decisions that Pune-based Rajeevlochan Phadke took in his career, when he quit his job at the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) to start a company of his own in 2001.
Three-years later, when his company finally started taking shape, there were just five employees; but his focus was on developing a software that could bridge the language divide. This led him to develop the software, ‘Script Magic’.
Today the software, which enables enterprise resource planning (ERP) application in local Indian languages such as Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati and Tamil, is used by 16 nationalised banks and also the Indian Railways.
His company, Image Point Technologies, now has 50 employees and is planning to tap e-governance projects of the state government and the municipal corporations across the country.
“Using this software, different programmes can be translated into several Indian languages, making it very effective for users. TCS, Infosys and Wipro, among the leading product suppliers, are using our software for providing the translator option to all the leading banks in the country. We also bagged the Indian Railways’ contract last April,” said Phadke, whose company is worth several crores.
He said the software has been developed to be useful for end-users, who can’t speak English.
“After the banking sector, now the insurance sector is opening up to convert their contents in local languages and ‘Script Magic’ can play a crucial role in it. Now national insurance companies are coming up with policies for the poor and rural population. For this it is imperative that the policies should be in local languages that they or an insurance agent can understand,” he said.
The software intercepts the output of the target application before it goes to the operating system. It has a dictionary that translates English produced by any application and to any desired local language in the output stream provided in the operating system.
“Though there are other software available that give options for a user to type in various local languages, a software that can convert English to other languages along with the interface support is not common. Currently, ‘Script Magic’ can readily translate application suites from SAP, Oracle E-Business Suite, Sage, Finacle, TCS BaNCS, Oracle Flexcube and Adobe Acrobat,” Phadke claims.
It also translates applications based on frameworks like Adobe AIR, Microsoft .Net and Java. It can readily support custom applications as well. This application can either be installed on a web server to translate web-based applications or directly on a user’s desktop.
