A story in the Hindustan Times discusses the effect of “e-governance” on the information technology market in India.
“The local language software market in India, which was merely half a million dollars worth three years ago, is expected to grow manifold and will approximately be to the tune of $64 million by 2005,” says Frost and Sullivan director, Aditya Sapru….
Pointing out that only five per cent of the total Indian population could read or write in English language, Sapru says: “if any e-governance initiative in this country has to succeed, then majority of the communication has to take place in a language common people understand.”…
[MAIT executive director Vinnie] Mehta says [the consortium on innovation and language technology (COIL-tech)], which was formed last year to drive benefits of IT to vernacular languages, will provide a platform for development of computing standards and also encourage collaborative research and development in multilingual computing.
Pointing out that COIL-tech has already developed font standards for seven Indian languages, including Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati and Malayalam, he says the deficiencies in the Unicode with regard to supporting Indian languages have also been taken up with the International Unicode Consortium and would be resolved soon.
(Thanks to fieldmethods.net for the link.)
Eny one thinking about the techno economy of localisation? Unicode is a multy national consperency.Iam looking for the coment on it.
Sreeekumar
University of Kerala
Persons interested in Indian languages can download free Hindi Word Processor ‘Madhyam’, developed by Balendu Sharma Dadhich, to work in languages that use Devnagari script. These languages are Hindi, Sanskrit, Nepali, Marathi, Konkani, Rajasthani, Maithili etc.
Any on who intrsted to get Unicode Malayalam font and a free editore for Malayalam pls visit http://www.clickeralam.org
Ananatha