Fair bit of interest developing around local language content on the internet. Have been wondering what opportunities will present themselves over next few years as the opportunity unfolds. Some pieces of the puzzle:
1. Authoring tools
2. Standard rendering technology (still see too many floating around)
3. Content creation – Since english remains the main business language, who will create content and what kinds of content will be available in local language
4. The same question as in 3, but applied to applications
5. Tools to do 3,4 easily and without duplicating 100% effort
6. Search
7. Role of user generated content for local language ecosystem (relates to the question of who is going to create content)
Would love to hear back on what you think are the near term opportunities (3-5 years)
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Just to moderate the previous comment a bit, I do believe that there will be many opportunities opening up. After all, the most widely read newspaper in India is not an English one – http://syndication.indiatimes.com/articlelist/12972445.cms
However a lot of opportunities may be in simply providing the infrastructure for local language apps/content in the first few years rather than the apps/content themselves, as you hint in your post.
Clearly, there is a large market between purely english literate audience, and those who cant read/write at all — so i guess its worth addressing. On the last part, how have other languages solved it? Japanese, Chinese etc?
Simply generating local language content/apps may not be enough for the following reasons.
* The literacy rates even in local language are abysmal. Official reports peg this at 52% (http://www.censusindia.net/results/provindia3.html) but given that the test of literacy is just “can you write your own name”, I would guess the real figure of functional literacy is much lower. http://www.literacy.org/products/ili/pdf/LAPIndiaCase_total.pdf reveals the ridiculous shenanigans behind the figures e.g. till 1981, literacy was measured by answers to the question “Are you literate?”. Even today, the %ages are quoted based on the population that is above 7 years of age. Once we filter for these misrepresentations and further filter that population on income levels and familiarity with technology, there may not be more than a 2-4x leap possible over the current (English-only) penetration of the internet (40M as per IAMAI).
* Rendering support, as you point out, is a big issue. I think it is the biggest one. Many sites use proprietary fonts, which is a weird lock-in strategy. Some sites do use UTF-8, but Devnagiri under utf-8 is very unreadable because of concepts that UTF-8 has not even planned for e.g. half-consonants, vowels-that-precede-consonant, and composite consonants (ksha). This is even more of a problem because the segment that a local language effort would target is likely to be very unsavvy with technology and unlikely to tolerate the sort of rendering you see on say http://www.google.co.in/hi
* Vocabulary & Culture – most Indian languages lack the vocabulary for describing “typical web content” e.g. I know Hindi fairly well, but on http://www.google.co.in/hi, I don’t understand “nirdeshika”, “vistrit khoj”, “variytayen”. Fairly common words from program menus have no easy counterparts e.g. Tools, Options, Bookmarks, Edit, Copy, Paste. The English language has been evolving its vocabulary and culture over the last 50 years while the population developed familiarity with these ideas. It will take quite a while for these concepts to take hold “natively” in local languages.
Krish, do you think we need to get the desktop stack working to make this happen? From what I can see happening to desktop software itself, it seems that there might be a leapfrog opportunity to go straight to the web.
In fact, one could do the full authoring stack which is desktop and web friendly (similar to Writely and Google Spreadsheets), and that could be a good point to start. Since there is little point in creating a fully parallel stack here, I wonder if you can take Writely etc and just do a multilingual capability on top of that?
On your question of whether local content will make splash, I think the question is not “if” but “when”…
Alok,
Thanks a ton. Very good initiative. Of late VW posts were going way off tangent and it did sadden me. I was beginning to get disillusioned.
Without local language solutions, rural and marginalised people in India who do not understand English on the internet will remain isolated from new information, education and knowledge resources. That spells doom for our nation as a whole. No, we want everyone to participate in prosperity.
It should be a kinda’ Indialinux – a free open source software (FOSS) where other developers have the freedom to use, study, modify and redistribute according to their and others’ needs. It should ideally come packaged with a set of software products including GNOME, Open Office and the Mozilla suite as well as other utilities that include a local language spellchecker, thesaurus and the language code support. M/o IT should also pitch in with its might with some grants etc.
But would internet make a splash like the localised content did to alternative media like SMS…not very sanguine though….but then Cable TV which started off with English, later turned to local content has been a huge success.
I am not sure whether I can draw such an analogy.