Request: Add Bangla (Bengali) language support to NMT NIM
Hello NVIDIA Team,
I am a developer from Bangladesh with a verified NVIDIA Developer Program account.
The Request
Please add Bangla (Bengali / bn-BD) language support to the NMT (Neural Machine Translation) NIM API endpoint.
Why This Matters
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Number of speakers | ~265 million native speakers worldwide |
| Global ranking | Top 5-7 most spoken languages |
| Primary regions | Bangladesh (official language) and West Bengal, India (including Kolkata) |
| Current NVIDIA support | ✅ Speech NIM supports Bengali (bn-IN) for ASR and TTS |
The Gap
NVIDIA Speech NIM already supports Bengali for Speech-to-Text (ASR) as confirmed in the official release notes (Parakeet 1.1b RNNT Multilingual with Indic language support including bn-IN).
However, the NMT NIM translation service does NOT support Bangla. Currently, it supports 36 languages including Hindi, Arabic, Thai, and Vietnamese, but Bangla is missing.
What works today:
- ✅ English ↔ Hindi translation
- ✅ English ↔ Arabic translation
- ✅ Speech-to-Text for Bengali (bn-IN) - this proves the language is technically feasible
What does NOT work:
- ❌ English ↔ Bangla text translation
- ❌ Bangla ↔ any other language text translation
Technical Evidence
As per NVIDIA’s public documentation [citation:4]:
“Expanded language support table including Bengali (bn-IN), Tamil (ta-IN)” - Speech NIM ASR
This confirms NVIDIA has already done the foundational work to support Bengali. Extending this to text translation would open up NVIDIA NIM to millions of additional developers and users.
What We Want to Build
Developers in Bangladesh and West Bengal want to use NVIDIA NIM for:
- Translating educational content from English to Bangla
- Building local business applications
- Enabling Bangla language support for global AI tools
Questions for NVIDIA
- Is there any roadmap for adding Bangla to the NMT NIM?
- If yes, what is the estimated timeline?
- If not currently planned, what would it take to prioritize this?
Thank you for considering this request. Please let me know if I can provide any additional information.
Country: Bangladesh
Region: South Asia
Use case: Text translation for educational and business applications