Trend

Mobile phones go multilingual

With mobile penetration increasing in rural India, service providers are offering multilingual applications especially for this market, writes Vinita Gupta

India is currently the most impressive market in the mobile communication space. Without any significant government subsidization, today there are more than 250 million mobile subscribers cutting across barriers of class, wealth and location throughout the length and breadth in the country.

The trend is increasingly towards localized content as mobile operators are looking at rural and semi-urban markets. The growth is however yet to burgeon as the total penetration of the mobile space is around 20%. The rural market is the way to go as the trend shows from last year that net addition to the total mobile subscriber base was the highest from small towns.

A multilingual application takes into account the preferences of mobile users and provides an enhanced experience. India provides an immense opportunity as it is one of the best examples of a multilingual country. Which is why service providers have started providing multilingual applications. For instance, Reliance Communications offers six languages and is scaling it up to support 11 more.

Early days for multi-lingual services

Multi-lingual interfaces on mobile devices are at a nascent stage in India at present. Beyond the ability to display the mobile phone’s native “user-interface” in different languages, there are hardly any applications delivering dynamic multilingual content.

There are several reasons why multilingual applications on mobile devices are few and far between today. First off, dynamic multilingual applications tend to be complex and memory intensive as they typically work on using a language synonym library of words to transliterate words received in a sentence string. To be able to effectively transliterate words (which is different from translation), the mobile application needs to have a large set of words loaded into memory or else the transliteration would fail. Secondly, the recipient device needs to have the multilingual application installed and the library (or libraries as may be the case) of the target language(s) loaded into memory, else the user would receive text which would be unintelligible.

Some multilingual mobile applications are simply delivering the English phonetic equivalent of messages. This, however, does not always work as the recipient needs to be literate in English to read the English characters to decipher the phonetic equivalent words.

Lack of multilingual applications is also evident in the online domain—this despite having adequate memory and computing horsepower available on the Web servers. Beyond transliteration, multilingual applications actually need to do dynamic translation of content for the application to be of value to the end user.

Sankalp Saxena, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Moveo Systems said, “Translation requires the engine to not only have a library of multilingual synonyms but also understand the grammatical structure of the language and associated sentence in order for it to work effectively. This only adds to the overall complexity of the application.”

Moveo is working on a few applications which will enable users distributed across rural India to receive content in their Indian language of choice. The company is focused more on the application protocol for compositing the content and not as much on the translation component as it is partnering with other providers for this capability.

Nick Desai, Founder and CEO of Juice Wireless conceded, “While there are many prominent languages in India, a majority of mobile applications are in English for the Indian market. The reason is that the vast majority of Indian customers who use mobile data services are English speakers.” He added that for an application such as JuiceCaster, which is about community and connecting people, multi-lingual support is important, “Our initial launches in India will be in English but over time, we will offer JuiceCaster in Hindi and other languages as well.”

Soma Srikanth, GM, Business Development, NetXcell believed that the growth in metros has become stagnant as 70% of the subscriber base is now from the metros. By 2010, the mobile subscriber base would reach 497 million with majority of subscribers coming from semi-urban and rural areas—12% from metros, 34% from circle A, 40% circle B and 14 % from circle C.

Rohit Kapoor, Senior Manager, Qualcomm Internet Services, Qualcomm India and SAARC, mentioned that BREW users now have access to the Hindi BREW catalog which not only provides them with applications in Hindi, but also offers the complete user interface, messages and price plans in Hindi. In 2007, together with Tata Teleservices, the company has launched the Hindi version of Tata Zone, which is available on BREW-enabled devices. With more than 50 applications available on each Hindi enabled Brew device, Qualcomm hopes to expand its portfolio.

Challenges faced

Issues arise from the vast array of handsets and platforms, which means that the providers have to build/port for a variety of handsets. This adds to the cost and complexity. Additionally, since screen sizes are small, keypads are limited and data speeds are slow, the service providers have to be careful in designing a user interface to enable ease-of-use.

“There are many challenges in the process of developing mobile applications. For instance, developers of Web sites and tool vendors for mobile devices sometimes forget to take into account constraints such as a rigid layout, small size of screen, resolution, navigation links, large pages to be loaded over cellular network, application in need of large memory and processing power,” stated Anil Arora, Business Group Head, GSM, LG Electronics. Moreover testing and quality assurance people should have knowledge of targeted language to report problems related to rendering and display of characters, meanings conveyed through translations, handling composite messages and usability.

Over the air (OTA) data access services continue to be the biggest issue in the content-based business model. Fortunately technological advances, coupled with lower price points, are helping accelerate the adoption of data access services, like GPRS, across both the incumbent subscriber base as well as with new subscribers, pointed out Saxena. He added, “One additional bottleneck has been the revenue share bias, which exists in the Indian market between telcos and content providers. Rationalization of this to a happier medium will result in a far more sustainable win-win proposition.”

According to Srikanth, issues in developing applications for mobile are constrained memory, power reserves, user interfaces, and input devices. Another major challenge is that mobile browser environment is highly fragmented as a number of browsers are available for different mobile devices.

Other solutions/applications

In India, the mobile phone is becoming the device people rely on, not only for basic communication, but also for entertainment on the go. Though it is easy to focus on India’s need for low-cost devices for rural markets, technology providers cannot disregard the increasing importance of high-end, multimedia-rich phones in this burgeoning marketplace.

As India’s wireless market continues its remarkable evolution, handsets are increasingly becoming the nexus of mobile content and applications. Growth in the mobile multimedia space—which is especially evident with India’s youth market—shows a strong demand for mobile data content and introduces challenges that the wireless industry must overcome to attain full success in this bustling region.

Basic applications that are gaining importance in India are music, gaming, the Internet, TV, video, GPRS, PDA system (navigation system), Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, MP4, Internet Protocol TV, touch screen with 3X content, Windows XP, dual utility gizmo, smart phones, both GSM and CDMA facility, 5 megapixel cameras, interaction with social networking sites and blog sites, also video uploads and other related features.

The third generation of mobile technology or 3G is the future of mobile in India. 3G would be the cell phone equivalent of broadband. With 3G, data can be transferred at rates between 64 and 384 kilobytes per second, a blazing speed compared to most phones whose transfer speed is slower than the old 14.4 kbps. It will create a unified global phone standard. Above all, it will transform your phone into a multimedia center. With revenues growing at a scorching pace, the future of mobile VAS market looks very promising, and is expected to reach $9 billion by 2010.

vinita.gupta@expressindia.com