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IAMAI, Indian govt step up to boost multilingual Internet While the Indian government and industry has been keen to develop standards and rules for Indian languages on the Internet, the problem is far from becoming a reality any time soon, mainly because there is no consolidated platform for all stakeholders to work together. In order to bridge this gap, the Internet and Mobile Association of India on Monday brought together stakeholders from industry, government, technical community and academia at the ongoing meeting of the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN57) in Hyderabad.
Big companies such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and relatively newer players such as DataMail, whose company provides email in eight Indian languages, and Reverie Solutions, whose Indic keyboard is widely used in India, are amongst the ones working on Indian language computing and making it Internet friendly.
“This (Indic language standards) is the need of the hour. It will be the next phase of India. There is a lot of work happening but clearly it’s inadequate,” said Rajiv Bansal, joint secretary at the Ministry of electronics and Communications Technology.
IAMAI agreed that there are gaps in the efforts being undertaken, and that the association would step up efforts to bring more people on the same platform to speed up efforts in the field of Indic language computing.
Apart from the multiplicity of language and scripts, India also has the unique problem of people speaking the same language in different dialects and pronunciation.
Further complicating the problem are interoperability issues that people are trying to solve the world over. For example, making sure a person sending an email from an address like सुनील@मेल.भारत to অনিল@মেইল.ভারত can take place without any loss of information.
“Work needs to be done by engaging with bodies like ICANN at the highest level, because it is them who control the root server. The key to root server is with them, and they have to amend their rule sets to allow Indic languages to be interoperable. That is why we as a country should engage with them,” said MeitY’s Bansal.
The group within ICANN working on this is called Universal Acceptance Steering Group, whose work will enable a “truly multilingual Internet, one in which users around the world can navigate entirely in local languages”.
“The technical work required to make universal acceptance (UA) a reality is not very high,” said Ram Mohan, an ICANN board member. He suggested local content websites should initiate a review to become UA ready, and said the primary issue to address is to get a decision maker at the highest level to make things work.
Another point of view is that the government should look to develop language capabilities as an infrastructure available to all, and not have a piecemeal, product based approach to developing language technology.
According to Anivar Aravind, executive director at the Indic project, language inclusion as part of Digital India is a welcome move, but "the work of government funded Indian language research on OCR technologies, text to speech, speech to text , computational linguistics etc all got locked up under restricting conditions in India's top research institutions and Technology Development of Indian Languages (TDIL)."
The key to greater adoption will be having technology standards created on free and open source software and made available to everyone for use. "Language belongs to people. Language technology is civic tech in which people need control and correction. This will empower startups or community to build their solution on top of the stack, because it is not easy to bring language expertise, linguists and developers together for all Indian languages," he added.
Don Hollander Universal Acceptance Steering Group Skype: don_hollander