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Stuck in a rut

Although pundits proclaim that Indians want nothing more than to use IT in their mother tongues, regional language computing remains a niche technology. By Nivedan Prakash

There are some positive signs with regard to the availability of software applications in regional languages. For e.g. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is available in 11 Indian languages. Similarly, Google offers Search, Gmail, Docs, Calendar, iGoogle, Orkut, News India, YouTube, Blogger, Translate, and Images in various Indian languages, including Hindi, Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Marathi, Gujarati, Malayalam, and Punjabi. Google also supports page translations for search results into Hindi and back. The company recently launched the Google Translator Tool Kit, which enables the manual translation of documents.

The silver lining in the dark cloud that is regional language computing is that the public sector is bound to procure bilingual software, as it caters to the demands and requirements of the aam junta. At the same time, the growing IT infrastructure in tier II and tier III cities is leading to some demand for vernacular products. Last but not least, the primary education segment in rural India is gearing up with local language education infrastructure.

That being said, parents in urban areas prefer to educate their children in English as can be seen in the ongoing court case regarding English Medium schools in Karnataka.

To date, the only sector of Indian industry that has gone in for regional language software in a big way has been vernacular publishing (books, newspapers, and magazines).

M D Kulkarni, Program Coordinator and Head-GIST Group of C-DAC, Pune, commented, “Tools and technologies are available for Indian languages from CDAC, GIST Pune under the aegis of the TDIL program of the Ministry of Communications & Information Technology, Dept. of IT. A Basic Information Processing Kit (BIPK) for Indian languages has been made available to users free of cost. To date, 16 language software tools and font CD titles have been released and close to 6-7 lakh CDs have been distributed free of cost. If we include the vernacular localization requirements and e-governance requirements, the demand for Indian language applications is high. The market size for localization itself is close to Rs 1,200 crores."

Scope of the market

It is imperative to push IT to small towns. Our country could only attain a certain degree of success in IT because the people were well versed with English. However, this English-speaking segment accounts for less than 8% of the overall population. We are yet to address the needs of the 92% who prefer communicating in their mother tongue. [One must take these figures with a pinch, or even a pound, of salt. While the number of Indians who speak English fluently is miniscule, broken English is a lingua franca of sorts in this country of ours and going by the fervor with which parents fight to get their kids into English medium schools, the number of English speakers will only grow over time. While people do prefer consuming entertainment in their own language and speak it at home, business communication in the private sector remains largely in English - Editor]. There has been a slow start to the task of localizing software applications. All the prominent software companies have either localized their products or have started doing so.

Pankaj Jain, COO of Webdunia, asserted that developing standard fonts and easy to use keyboards to input local languages can help bridge the gap whereas the availability of IT infrastructure to the common man continues to be a challenge.

One area in which regional language computing might help is in broadening the appeal of the Internet in India. Today only about 5% of the population is online.

“One of the primary barriers for not attaining a higher level of Internet penetration is language. It has been a difficult experience for those who do not speak English. Across the world, the Web has developed in the local language; and there's no reason why it can't be done in India, as the potential is huge and hundreds of people would benefit from the Internet if it is in the local language,” said Rahul Roy-Chowdhury, Product Manager at Google India.

Satish Mohan, Director-Software Engineering, Red Hat India, said, “The characteristics and orientation of the Indian populace towards consuming print and audio-visual communication is regional and localized in nature. They seem to be more amenable to communicating in their mother tongue. There is a difference in usage as well as demand for vernacular content amongst the Indian populace. While the urban Indian only accesses vernacular content occasionally and indulges in local language access and exchange on a cyclical basis, the rural population frequently uses vernacular content.”

“The reason for this difference is primarily because of the unavailability of infrastructure as well as content in regional languages,” added Mohan. For rural areas, as an example, an apt application would be providing medical information through public access computers. Research and development efforts are also needed to provide predictive translation initiatives such as context-specific literal translation as well as Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Text-to- Speech. There has been an upswing in the availability of applications that support regional languages on mobile devices and with rich Web applications.

“Language computing is at a nascent stage where the masses are unaware of offerings through which they can compute in their own language. We recently introduced IE 8 in various languages and are running a contest in several cities to create awareness about this new offering. We also have language interface packs for Office 2003 that provide a localized user interface for the four most popular applications of the suite namely Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. Windows XP Professional and Home edition provide a localized User Interface for emerging or minority language markets,” commented Meghashyam Karanam, Product Manager - Vision and Localization, Microsoft India.

Rising computer literacy levels and e-governance projects are contributing to the growing usage of vernacular software.

State governments are implementing regional language software in school computer labs to provide children with the basic tools to learn about and use computers and the Internet. e-governance projects provide ISVs with an additional incentive to develop, maintain, and sustain applications that support regional language input and output.

Development challenges

The market for local language software is small and fragmented.

There are challenges in developing software packages in Indian languages as we have 22 official languages with various scripts.

Rafi Palgi, Executive Manager, FTK Technologies, opined that we have 22 languages, over 1,650 dialects, 10 scripts and over 3,000 characters and linguistic combinations across India. Multi-lingual and Indian language keyboards are unpopular due to the cumbersome method of typing that they force you to adopt.

“The challenge in Indian languages is to have an easy-to-use, intuitive User Interface; one cannot expect 90% of the Indian population (which is unfamiliar with English) to use an Roman alphabet keyboard to type in Indian languages,” added Palgi.

Word-processing and data-processing applications in Indian languages are common and most adhere to standards. However, in desktop publishing, graphics packages do not fully adhere to Unicode norms and there are issues in term of rendering Unicode compliant fonts. Therefore, the focus is on research areas such as Machine Assisted Translation Systems, cross-lingual information access, OCR, handwritten character recognition, and speech technologies.

Jain added that there are quite a few challenges in enabling software for Indian languages, which include retaining the simplicity of software irrespective of the complexity of Indian languages as well as ensuring the accuracy and meaning of User Interface strings in the Language framework.

Barriers to adoption

A study on the Local Language IT Market in India, conducted by Frost & Sullivan for DIT-MAIT, revealed that the current market size of local language applications has remained limited due to the lack of universal standards for scripts and fonts and the limited availability of vernacular software, fonts and local language content on the Internet. The market is currently driven by off-the-shelf applications for end-users such as the publishing industry and government bodies.

With the lack of standards, content creation in vernacular languages and sharing data from one language to another becomes a challenge. So the development depends on vendor-based standards which creates compatibility hassles.

Echoing his views on the same, Mehta said that the market availability for regional language software is quite small when compared to that for software in English. “Earlier, we had some vibrant players developing local language software applications but unfortunately a lot of them either wrapped up their business or have been acquired by giants. Moreover, computer penetration is limited to the urban and semi-urban areas of our country.

Content is also an important aspect and hence more content in Indian languages, in various domains such as tourism, health, agriculture, legal, etc., is needed. Lack of content and linguistic resources in digital medium such as dictionaries and thesauri are posing a serious obstacle to the growth of Indian languages. Moreover, several private players complain that although e-governance projects are a huge market for local language software the government prefers to deal with NIC or C-DAC. As a result, none of the private players have been able to survive in this domain.

Meanwhile, Google and Microsoft are addressing the end-user aspect. “Earlier there wasn't a large corpus of local language content as compared to content in English. We acted as a catalyst for this ecosystem, wherein we made it easy to create content. Our Automated Translation Tool translates from English to Hindi and back. We also made it easier for users to search in the local language,” stated Roy-Chowdhury.

Other factors hindering the growth of this market include a lack of formal IT-based training, lack of implementation of vernacular solutions at government schools, limited usage of available Indian language software solutions, low Internet penetration, and insufficient or delayed implementation of the initiatives taken up by various government bodies.

Other aspects

The applications available in regional languages include word processing, desktop publishing, translation and transliteration, online banking, ticket booking services, online education, government services, Bharat Operating System and Solutions, localized versions of Bharateeya OpenOffice, edutainment applications, e-commerce and community gateways, and other free and Open Source apps.

Karanam pointed out that Microsoft considers it as its responsibility to take the benefits of technology to the masses and, in a country like India where over half of the population cannot speak in English, it is vital to communicate with the masses in their own tongue. Microsoft introduced Project Bhasha in 2003 and this has been instrumental in bringing together governments, academia and research institutions, local ISVs and developers and industry associations for promoting local language usage in IT.

Local language IT applications are expected to find use across a wide segment of the market, including the government sector, private sector, and public enterprises. There will be much more content in Indian languages available online. We are also seeing a rise in searches for local content.

nivedan.prakash@expressindia.com