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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Krish,
“IndiaLinux” has long been there as in “IndLinux” which has localization teams for all of the 11 official Indian Languages and is licensed under the GNU GPLv2, though is not supported by the MoIT. There is also Sarai based out of Delhi which has been giving fellowships to many of the IndLinux developers.
Alok,
There are many of the components already there, which you described. The best way to do localization is to follow Unicode, which is a standard for localization all over the world.
1. Authoring tools
– There are many authoring tools for Unicode like yudit, etc.
2. Standard rendering technology (still see too many floating around)
– Unicode and there are unicode fonts available on all platforms, including Win XP, which has 5 indic fonts natively.
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
– Here I tend to disagree. The problem with localization initiatives in India is because of the largely diverse languages used all over the country which complicates matters and the fact that the Indian Internet Users are mostly the English speaking people. China has had much success with chinese because it is the only language being used across China. There are efforts like the databases of “National Innovation Foundation, Ahmedabad” which have their Innovation databases in Indian Languages, but again the efforts are largely associated with NGOs and govt. initiatives. And also the fact that any local language initiative needs to have a language transliteration system for switching between different languages to view the same dataset.
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
– Search comes only when we have enough Local Language content.
7. Role of user generated content for local language ecosystem (relates to the question of who is going to create content)
– Thats the biggest problem. Well, there are also people who have been blogging in Hindi.
And there are people, who are much more comfortable with reading and writing English than in Hindi or any other local language for that matter.
-Animesh
Alok,
Take a cue from http://www.raftaar.com…It‘s going beta now…would solve some your queries…on others I’ll come back after a while with some ( hopefully ) useful ideas.
Krish
Alok, re: infrastructure, I bucketed all the following under that heading
* fonts
* “basic” tools – email, search, chat
* authoring tools
* keyboards and mobile keypads/transformation mechanisms using conventional keyboards.
* user education if we need something complicated like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_input_methods, though given that Hindi typewriters work well, I suspect not – again, the whole issue of Japanese/Chinese is something I will look at in more detail.
* OS support at reasonable cost
* localization of all resources required for interaction with a PC e.g. user manuals for devices, driver documentation
* tech support communities around specific languages
* research resources like WordNet, and Concept Network
I think entrepreneurs could conceivably serve each one of these needs to a good degree. Of course, it would be most rewarding for everyone if the results from these efforts were released at about the same time for each language – something a foresighted VC could bring about 😀
This particular issue has been bugging me for some time 🙂 Interesting qn on Japanese/Chinese – will look up the history there.
Himanshu, when you say infrastructure, what kind of things are you referring to? tools? user platform? …