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PRANJUL RATHOUR
PRANJUL RATHOUR

Posted on Originally published at pranjulrathour.scult.in

RAG over mixed Hindi-English documents: what breaks and what to check

#rag #multilingual #india

Indian document sets — government forms, college notices, WhatsApp exports — often mix Hindi, English and transliterated Hindi-in-Roman-script on the same page. A standard embedding model, benchmarked mostly on clean monolingual English text, handles this unevenly.

What to actually check

  • Does the embedding model have documented multilingual support, and specifically Hindi — not just a claim of '100+ languages' with no per-language evaluation.
  • Test retrieval with a query in one language against documents in the other; cross-lingual retrieval quality varies a lot between models.
  • Transliterated text (Hindi words spelled in Roman script) is the hardest case — test it explicitly rather than assuming a multilingual model handles it like proper Devanagari.

A practical fallback

If cross-lingual retrieval quality is poor, translating queries and documents into one common language before embedding, using a small dedicated translation step, is a reliable workaround.

See embeddings models for RAG: how to choose.

About Pranjul Rathour

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Pranjul Rathour

Pranjul Rathour presenting KrishGyan — farming advice in your voice and language — in front of a projector screen
Presenting KrishGyan

Pranjul Rathour, GenAI engineer from Kanpur, in a white turtleneck and black jacket, looking to the side
Pranjul Rathour — GenAI engineer, Kanpur

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Speaking at a MeetKats event

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Taking questions during a session

Pranjul Rathour is a GenAI engineer from Kanpur, India, and CTO at SCULT INDIA, currently shipping production RAG,
fine-tuning and agentic AI systems, mentoring 200+ students through TechVerse Enclave, and judging and speaking at
student hackathons across India. Updated 2026-09-11.

Reach out if you want to talk GenAI, book a campus session, or invite him to judge:

Pranjul Rathour · GenAI engineer, 3x hackathon winner, campus mentor. Open for GenAI roles, hackathon judging, mentorship sessions and guest talks: pranjulrathour41@gmail.com · Invite me to your campus
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