1.	The Director, CIIL, made a brief presentation on the proposed Translation Service and apprised the members of the discussions that have been held by him on this proposal in the Department of Secondary Education, MHRD, in which the Mr. M.K. Kaw, the Education Secretary, Ms. Bela Banerjee, Joint Secretary (Languages) and Mr. Upamanyu Chatterji, Director (L) were present. The proposed service, called Anukriti addresses the long-felt requirement for creating a mechanism to coordinate the activities in respect of different kinds of translations currently being done by organizations, institutions and individuals in a sporadic and disorganized manner. The monitoring and promotional action could be done by setting up a web-based service specially devoted to Translation - both Literary and Non-literary, including Machine-aided Translation in the public domain. He hoped it would contribute to promotion of Indian languages and writing and projecting them abroad.
2.	The Director, CIIL also made a brief electronic presentation to emphasize the idea behind Anukriti and showed a model design of the site which he proposed to be jointly launched by CIIL, Sahitya Akademi and NBT. He also suggested that the site could be launched in 2001, so that support for this nationally important collaborative activity could be sought from the Xth Plan Steering Committees on Education and Culture by all three participating institutions.
3.	The Director, NBT, commented on the importance of this move in the electronic era, and mentioned the services on the net (such as amazon.com) already being provided by the private groups to promote books published from abroad in English and foreign languages. He mentioned that with participation in the international Book-fairs by NBT, the interest in books published from India has increased. He, however, suggested that although the general idea of creating a service like this was commendable for which credit should go to the CIIL to have proposed the idea, but that it must eventually involve the publishers devoted to publishing translation in Indian languages, apart from the active cooperation of the publishers of Indian writing in English.
4.	The Secretary, Sahitya Akademi suggested that the service could be initially launched with already available materials in print, and the bibliographic and informative documents produced by Akademi (such as Who's Who of Authors, National Register of Translators and Who's Who of Sanskrit Scholars, Bibliography of Published Literary Works in all Indian languages) could be put on the net. If possible, the bibliography of translations in Indian languages currently being prepared by Dr. G.N. Devi (ready upto 1990) could also be included so that it could be expanded eventually through people's participation.
5.	The Director, NBT suggested that the translational tools such as dictionaries and thesauri as well as cultural and technical glossaries created by NBT, CIIL, CHD and other agencies could be made available on-line, and then expanded to include more ambitious tools and techniques. He, however, observed that all these would require the site to be really robust.
6.	The Director, CIIL, commented that the CIIL is already taking all technical steps (such as setting up of a LAN system, V-SAT connectivity through STPI, additional ISDN connectivity, large UPS-back up, acquiring necessary software, hardware and contractual manpower) required to tackle this giant task. Thesite is proposed to be a collocational site with different IP addresses and at least of 10 GB size to start with.
7.	A question was raised by Director, NBT as to promotion of the proposed site. It was generally agreed that the site was to be promoted through the press and mass media as well as through the different electronic news services (provided by .com companies) initially without incurring much cost.
8.	The Secretary, Sahitya Akademi commented that an appropriate brochure may be printed by all three organizations together outlining the idea behind Anukriti and highlighting the services offered through the net. The brochure may be widely distributed among publishers, authors, translators and academics as well as taken to all book fairs so that the idea is known to all potential users. The Director, NBT emphasized the need to give proper publicity to Anukriti, because in the past experience of NBT in trying to bring out BOOKS IN PRINT with the help of publishers all around the country, nothing much could be done so far.
9.	The representative of OUP welcomed the plan and commented that the idea, even though ambitious, is worth-pursuing and could surely seem to be attractive to both users and publishers of translation. However, initially, the publishers would probably join by sending product info, newsletters and announcements, brochures to the organizers and also post books in and on translation for reviews. She mentioned that there is greater role to be played by those publishers like Katha who specialize in publishing Indian bwriting in translation as well by those Indian languages publishers like Rajkamal in Hindi or Ananda Publishers in Bengali in this project.
10.	The OUP representative, however, wanted that the developers of the site be clear about the target users/readers of the site/service before launching it.
11.	Further she also warned that bringing in published work of translation in Indian languages would involve a lot of programm1ing work in converting the texts input by different publishers in different Indian languages softwares into a certain unified standard code to ensure stylistic uniformity with options to download at least a read-only version of the software by the end-users who may like to read these texts on the net. The Director, CIIL observed that the institute had created an Indian languages software, Bhasha which is now being revised to create a Bhasha @2001 in which all Indian languages texts would be recast first. A downloadable version of the software would be made available to all end-users who may like to browse through actual texts and translations in Indian languages.
12.	The representative of Katha generally welcomed the idea but said that she would take the information provided back to her organization to consider how Katha could participate in this activity in a more meaningful way.
13.	The editor, Samakaleen, raised the question of editorial and evaluation work related to the proposed journal, Translation Today, and suggested that these be done with the help of literary scholars and creative persons and not be left to only linguists. It was agreed that the editorial board of the journal would be appropriately expanded to include both literary and language scholars to ensure quality of translations (both solicited and unsolicitated) on the net.
14.	The Secretary, Sahitya Akademi raised a question as to how much of translated texts published under either Indian literature or Samakaleen be displayed on the site. It was agreed that only some sample pages will be displayed and the visitors to the site will be encouraged to order for the journal copies directly from the Akademi.
15.	On the question whether online sale of translated books would make the site more attractive for publishers in translation the representative of the OAP suggested that the online sales are still not so secured that the method could be used meaningfully in the present case. Therefore, the service need not initially attempt to address the issue of actual sales. However, the site will promote online sales anyway.
16.	It was generally agreed that Anukriti will not act as a Centre of power. It was agreed that the main responsibility of the translation service should be to coordinate and promote the activities.
17.	Lastly, it was agreed that the idea be pursued in all seriousness and that Sahitya Akademi and National Book Trust will take necessary steps to place the matter before their respective governing bodies for their concurrence and approval.