Vernacular computing movement gains impetus
Monday, 16 September 2002, 19:30 IST
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BANGALORE: Can the keyboard and the monitor get an Indian look? There's optimism in the air in this regard as a team of specialists from across India meet here to find ways to make Indian-language computing a more workable reality. The city will play host to an 'Indic-computing' workshop, with some 33 participants taking part in the September 15-16 event. Hewlett Packard is supporting the meet, while others like Pat Hall of the Open University, London, and individuals connected to the Mumbai-based Media Lab Asia have played a key role to make the meet possible. "Let's work together and make India not only a world leader in software but a world leader in vernacular software as well. Let's make Indian Language software so great that these jealous Latin-scriptwallas will have to transliterate into 'Devnagri' (script) to use our word processors, email clients and chat programmes," said Media Lab Asia-affiliated Tapan Parikh. Some call Indic and other South Asian scripts the final challenge to computer vendors for full internationalisation-of-computing support. It has taken its time coming, as the challenges are not that simple, and successes have been few and far between. South Asia, which is home to nearly one-sixth of all humanity, has been struggling for long to have regional-language solutions to make computing accessible to the common man. So, it's not difficult to understand the implications of this endeavour. Some Indian regional languages are more widely spoken than languages spoken by whole countries elsewhere. Practitioners of a range of Indian languages from various regions are to meet in this Karnataka state capital. These include long-time localisation proponent Venky Hariharan of Media Lab Asia, Vijay Pratap Singh of the Indian Institute of Management at Ahmedabad, and Sunil Abraham of the Bangalore-based non-governmental organisation (NGO) Mahiti, which helps not-for-profit organisations acquire computer technology. Other speakers who will share experiences in their quest for local language solutions are Aman Grewal of the Chhattisgarh government's CHIPS programme, Ashish Kotamkar of the regional language IT solution provider Mithi of Pune, and Ravi Kant of Sarai.net in Delhi. Specific difficulties to be tackled include encodings and the various solutions that Indian language specialists are still debating on including Unicode, ISCII (an attempt at standardising Indian-language solutions) or its Tamil equivalent TSCII. Display technologies and inputs methods will be specifically looked at and linguistic challenges will be confronted. One session will look at the various approaches and efforts to localise free software and open source GNU/Linux and other operating systems and applications for Indian languages. One Indic-computing strategy document prepared in May 2002 mooted a strategy to create a hierarchy of participatory consortia, to facilitate broad regional and local participation in standardization and development of solutions from a range of stake-holders with differing areas of expertise. By the end of the meet organizers hope to have a community of technically informed and motivated people to organize and lead the Indic-computing development effort into the future. Many issues need to be thrashed out. For instance, which languages need be tackled first? HP's Bangalore-based technical consultant Joseph Koshy argued that the north Indian 'Hindi family' promised the greatest reach population-wise. But he also conceded that the southern languages Kannada, Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam offered the greatest promise of real-world deployability. Outside his work at HP, Joshy is a volunteer-developer of the FreeBSD operating system and one of the founders of the Indic-computing project on SourceForge. He said: "What I am interested in is helping make standards-based, interoperable computing for Indian languages a reality. I want to see pagers, telephones, PDAs and other devices enabled for our native languages." Said C.V. Radhakrishnan from Kerala: "I think most south Indian languages would pose problems because of their non-linear nature, for example, to create conjunct glyphs in these languages one has to go back and forth, while north Indian languages do not have this problem. "Malayalam has peculiar characters called 'chillu', or half consonants, which have no equivalent in other languages, and could raise severe computing/programming challenges."
Source: IANS
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