Excellent post! I'm a native Bangla speaker, though my Bengali's not
great...I grew up half here in the US and half in Calcutta, India. My
dad's from Barishaal, so I can speak / understand a few dialects more
than your typical city Bangla speaker, but my reading / writing is
getting woefully rusty. Having Bangla resources on the web would serve a
secondary purpose; for people like me, it would let me keep in touch
with the language. Since I'm online a *lot* of the time, reading the
news from the subcontinent or updates on digital divide issues in Bangla
would be enough to keep me from getting rusty, especially if Google adds
a translation service to help me out eventually. Adding translation
would also mean that I could add Bangla to my list of translation
options for Drupal
(http://www.digitalraindrop.com/Drupal-CivicSpace-Translations).
For some reason, I have the impression that there is much more content
online in the East Asian languages than in other language groups. I'll
speculate on the reasons for this; feel free to chime in with your own
thoughts.
Firstly, I think it's significant that China, Japan, and Korea have
computers being sold with operating systems in their languages,
keyboards in their languages, even BIOS settings in their languages. I
was in Calcutta a year ago, and talked to a few nonprofits and
businesses working in computer education with marginalized communities
who are frequently not highly literate in English, and not one of them
could point me to a computer store selling hardware with Bangla (or
Hindi) defaults. A couple of computer hardware vendors I talked to
didn't even know where I could get things like that, or how I could set
my computer up to work with Bangla fonts.
This leads me to believe that those who are using Bangla fonts are doing
so as a novelty...people who are already somewhat fluent in another
language (usually English) and who use another language (again, English)
for most of their digital lives. The "real" end user, the user who does
not speak English, is not online. The "real" user in Korea, Japan, and
China, the big three East Asian nations, *are* online. Thus there is a
specific need for content in their languages, while there is no real
need for content in Bangla...while we may represent the 6th most spoken
language in the world, in terms of languages used and needed online
we're nowhere to be found.
Given this, I don't think Google offering Bangla search results is going
to change anything, though it's a welcome first step. The overwhelming
number of Bangali (adj: of Bengal, or Bangladesh) nonprofits and schools
involved in digital education are using English, and basing their work
on necessary English literacy classes. As long as this is the case,
native Bangla speakers will continue to be more comfortable using
English as the lingua franca of the internet. To see a significant jump
in Bangla resources online, we're going to have to see an intermediate
step: these schools and nonprofits are going to have to shift, at least
partially, to a model of digital training in local languages. And for
that to happen as anything more than a novelty or an experiment, we're
going to have to see adoption of local language computer use in
businesses, so that it becomes a valid part of workforce development.
And this is where the problem is. There are historic social and cultural
reasons for English use on the subcontinent being linked with greater
affluence, greater power, and greater prestige. As of now, the business
models that involve digital literacy (even a secretary in an
office...not usually considered a high-powered job in the US) targeted
this elite population. And for good reason, since it's a very, very
large population in India. So why limit ourselves to Bangla, when our
middle class (really an upper class in bourgeoisie disguise) is more
comfortable typing in English, and would have to be re-educated in
Bangla fonts and keyboard skills...also necessitating, to some level,
that our support staff be re-educated in similar skills?
To displace these models, a nonprofit is going to have to leap all of
these tiers and create an overarching solution from end to end, from
education to employment, to serve as a model that makes economic sense.
For example, if an NGO (especially a well-established, influential one
like Brac, http://www.brac.net/) were to set up a website development
service in Bangla and English, using workstations with both languages
and involving development work in Bangla, to plug in to a digital
literacy program, they would be creating their own need for Bangla
language computer operators.
The obstacle here is that you are doing a disservice to the first people
to pass through your Bangla computer literacy course. Is this justified?
Because according to the status quo, you're hurting their job
opportunities by *not* making them English computer users. At some point
when businesses and other organizations are using this model (and it
does make economic sense, since it would let you hire newly trained
digitally literate workers for less than their higher-priced middle
class counterparts with traditional educations) and there is a
widespread need for these skills, this education will have more value.
Initially, however, it will have almost no value at all...these workers
will be locked into their work in the ngo's business venture(s),
following an almost proprietary model.
How do we get around this? Maybe with bilingual digital education?
I'd appreciate hearing feedback / comments on this.
Dave.
-------------------
Dave A. Chakrabarti
Projects Coordinator
CTCNet Chicago
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
(708) 919 1026
-------------------
John Welch (RI-SOL/BNGD) wrote:
I'm excited in the way that only a geek who likes languages can be...
I turned on my computer yesterday and Google came up in Bangla
(Bengali). That shouldn't be too surprising since I live in
Bangladesh, but this was a new and surprising trick for my computer.
I didn't change anything, but apparently Google started a local
server (google.com.bd) which serves up content in UTF-8 encoded
Bangla. From talking with friends around the world, it sounds like
Google just kicked off a slew of these country-specific search
engines.
I'm country director of the Global Connections and Exchange Project
(GCEP) in Bangladesh, a project which aims to introduce computer and
internet technology into schools, and to promote intercultural
lessons via the internet. Last year, we put up a website in UTF-8
encoded Bangla. For fun, I tried to find it...a little ego surfing
-- I typed the name of my organization into the search engine in
Bangla: "relief international" and hit three times. I then tried
just "relief" and hit our page; I tried "international" and hit our
page. In fact, as I broadened the search terms to common items like
"school", "site", "link" and a bunch of other common words, I began
to realize that there just aren't a lot of websites in Bangla. I'd
like to think that our site is super-special (and it, of course, is),
but the world's sixth most spoken language is critically
under-represented on the internet -- talk about a digital divide.
Part of the problem has been standards. One standard is used in
India, while a proprietary standard is dominant in Bangladesh. I
believe that Unicode Bangla was only finalized around April of last
year. With the exception of our project, a few linux-related sites
and a few wikipedia entries, the Bangla-language wired world has been
a virtual desert.
A few developments bode well for Bangla on the internet, though: 1)
availability of unicode fonts (for instance, Vrinda which ships with
WinXP and a series of open source fonts), 2) availability of browsers
that can render unicode Bangla correctly (IE, Firefox, and probably
others), and 3) a popular search engine that can find some content in
Bangla. Perhaps this last factor will be enough to kick off an
explosion of internet use, but a fourth pillar is still missing: a
critical mass of content.
We've been working on ways to jumpstart Bangla content. Last year,
we started the first two Bangla-language projects on the Project
Gutenberg, Europe site. We've done a number of collaborative
projects between schools in Bangladesh using Bangla-based email and
forums, and have developed projects culminating in production of
essays, school newspapers and web pages in Bangla, all of which end
up on the web.
We're hoping to be part of a process to build local language content
to the point that casual users can perform a search and find
something useful in their own language. We may be a drop in the
bucket when it comes to the global picture, but we hope we're a good
example to early adapters of Bangla content development.
For a brief glimpse of the language and a discussion of how it can be
implemented on the internet, I've made a couple pages found at:
http://www.connect-bangladesh.org/bangla
Our Project Gutenberg projects can be found on the Project Gutenberg
Europe site: http://dp.rastko.net/
================================
Jack Welch, Country Director
Relief International - Schools Online, Bangladesh
+880-173-032-998
http://www.connect-bangladesh.org
The Global Connections and Exchange Program is funded by the US
Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, per
provisions of the Mutual Educational and Cultural Exchange Act of
1961, as amended.
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