IDC’s Dayaratna said he was particularly intrigued by Project Vanni because it directly addresses a particularly difficult coding obstacle, especially when development teams exist in many different countries speaking many different languages. The problem can also exist in countries with many different local languages, such as when widespread Indian teams have speakers writing in, for example, Hindi, Bengali, Marathi and Kannada.
The Vanni project is dealing with two difficult challenges. One is translating coding references without missing key technical details, especially when it is being translated into multiple languages. The second, potentially more severe, problem is doing these translations within a GenAI environment, where the algorithm can hallucinate or even simply try to extrapolate meaning where it might predict the next word incorrectly. If that happens, the translations become confusing and possibly destructive.
“What (coders) need is translation that is contextual and is specific to natural language prompts in software,” Dayaratna said, adding that translation specialized for developers “does not exist” yet.