Nearly 37,000 Supreme Court judgments since Independence have been translated into Hindi and now the process is underway to translate them in other regional languages, Chief Justice D. Y. Chandrachud said on Thursday.
After Hindi, "Tamil is leading now", the CJI, who was sharing bench with Justices JB Pardiwala and Manoj Misra, said during the hearing of a case. Justice Chandrachud said the apex court is in the process of translating its judgments in regional languages recognised by the Constitution.
The eighth schedule of the Constitution recognises 22 languages including Hindi, Assamese, Bengali, Bodo and Dogri.
The CJI also urged lawyers to give "neutral citations" of judgments from electronic Supreme Court Reports (e-SCR) during the hearings.
The top court, in 2023, launched the e-SCR project to provide free access to its judgments to lawyers, law students and the common public. Lawyers cite previous judgments in support of their arguments during hearings using e-SCR.
"Please use our e-SCR to refer to neutral citations (of cases)," the CJI said, adding that the translation of the SC judgments is now being done in regional languages with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) to ensure that they reach district courts across the country.
The CJI said the final translation is reviewed through human intervention.
Underscoring the importance of human intervention in translation, he referred to AI’s limitation and said it translates the term "leave granted as ‘avkash prapt hua’". In legal parlance, leave often means court's permission to a litigant to take recourse to a particular remedy.
The top court, while launching the e-SCR project, had said the judgments will be available on the apex court web site, its mobile app and on the judgment portal of the National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG).
The Electronic Supreme Court Reports (e-SCR) project is an initiative to provide the digital version of the apex court's judgments in the manner they are reported in the official law report – 'Supreme Court Reports'.
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