Ahmed Manzoor

Teaching a machine to hear Hindi

Amazon Alexa speech recognition

Speech-recognition training data has a requirement most document work does not: it has to match how people actually talk. Written Hindi and spoken Hindi diverge sharply in word order, register and borrowed vocabulary, and a corpus built from formal prose teaches the model the wrong language.

Delivered alongside Google product translation covering interface strings, legal terms and marketing copy in both Hindi and Urdu, and product content for Facebook.

A whole curriculum, twice

Modern Teaching Aids · Edurite / Pearson

Grades one through six mathematics, science, history, geography, language, writing and reading rendered into Urdu and again into Hindi. Five million words in a single programme, held to one terminology across every subject so a child meets the same word for fraction in year two and year five.

When schools closed in 2020, a second body of pre-K to high-school material followed for children and parents learning at home. Audio and video teaching material for grades five to ten was translated separately for Edurite, a Pearson subsidiary.

Informed consent, in both directions

Boehringer Ingelheim · Novartis · WHO

Clinical consent documents are translated forward and then translated back into English by the same hand, so a sponsor can see what the patient will actually read. This work ran in six directions for each sponsor: into Urdu, Hindi, Marathi and Gujarati, and out of them again.

Also courses for the WHO Better Birth programme, and documentation for medical equipment. Where a sponsor needs the full instrument workflow rather than a translation, the chain runs to eight steps: how linguistic validation works here.

Evidence, admissible

Litigation & civil registry

Chargesheets and their supporting documents, moved between English and Urdu, Hindi, Marathi and Gujarati two million words per direction, six directions. Court work forgives nothing: a hedged verb or a softened accusation changes what a document proves.

Alongside it, the quieter and equally exacting work of certificates birth, death, diplomas, marksheets where a single misread number can stall an immigration file or a degree recognition.

What the company promises its own staff

Shell · Procter & Gamble · HP · GSK · Johnson & Johnson

Codes of conduct, compliance manuals and internal policy training. These documents are read by people deciding whether to report something, so the translation has to be unambiguous about obligation the difference between should and must is the whole document.

Strings that have to fit

Samsung · Candy Crush · Angry Birds · Tango · MobileIron

On-screen display for Samsung cameras, and interface data for four apps. Devanagari sets longer than Latin and Nasta’līq needs vertical room, so UI translation is as much a fitting problem as a linguistic one the right word that overruns its button is the wrong word.

Adjacent consumer work: transcreated advertising for Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Duracell, survey instruments for Nielsen, website material for TD Bank, and announcement copy for Emirates, Etisalat and DU.

Urdu plays, for people learning Urdu

University of Maryland

Transcription and translation of Urdu drama, prepared as learning material for Western students of the language. The task is double: get the spoken text down accurately, then render it so a learner can see how the original works rather than only what it says.

Retail trading, explained twice over

Exness · FxPRO · Castrol · Jeep · Shell

Website content and user manuals for two foreign-exchange platforms, in Urdu and Hindi. Financial instruments carry regulatory language that must stay precise while the surrounding copy stays readable to a first-time trader.

Technical documentation followed the same rule: survey manuals for Shell, the Castrol website manual, a Jeep ATV user manual, and smoke-alarm installation instructions.