0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 Can Konkani make it speedily to computer age? PANJIM, NOV 9 By Herald News-Features Desk http://www.oherald.com/ Indian-language computing is taking impressive strides in the Free Software world. But, is Konkani getting left behind? By 2004, Indian language computing should be well on its way, with solutions working in many languages, said G Karunakar, a prominent campaigner for non-English solutions in computing, who passed by Goa in the past week. So what does the future hold for Goas official language, spoken by between 2-5 million also scattered in Karnataka, Maharashtra and Kerala? This language has been written in at least five different scripts, and its alphabet (in Devanagari) contains 47 characters 14 vowels and 13 consonants, named and ordered in Sanskrit-style. Fortunately for Konkani, the languages it shares a common script with whether Devanagari, Roman, Kannada, Malayalam or Perso-Arabic have worked out solutions of their own. But while Konkani can piggy-back on this to solve the script problem, it still doesnt allow any Konkani speaker to open a computer program and see the interface in his or her own language. Currently, there are three or four major groups working on Indian language solutions in the Free Software world in different parts of the country. Prof Nagarjuna of the TIFR in Mumbai and his team is doing font-related work. Jitendra Shah and team of Mumbai is working on Marathi and Gujarathi. In eastern India, much work has been done in Bengali. Likewise, teaming up with expat Indians, Tamil has taken several steps ahead in the world of Indian-language solutions. Government of India computing institutions, and the IITs, have also been working on this front. Recently, the Milan solution was released. This GNU/Linux-based solution boots up from a CD-rom and allows the user to work in as many as nine different Indian languages. Oriya and Punjabi have no `free fonts of their own. But in other languages, the fonts are becoming a non-issue, since there is at least one free font for every language. One other bottleneck is how the various teams can scale-up and speed up their work. Another question is a solution for the input tool (or keyboard), as not many are familiar with the Inscript layout, says Karunakar. What is to be done if Konkani is to take a leap ahead in the world of computers, specially in the easy-to-replicate Free Software world? Says Karunakar: The starting point for translation is to start with the Gnome glossary. Its a collection of most commonly occuring tech terms, which are used a lot in translations. Work becomes easy if you have this done first, then `po files can be taken up. (The .po files are a set of terms which, when translated, make internationalisation work easy in Free Software.) Karunakar says the glossary files are available at http://www.indlinux.org. There are already guides offering hints on the how-tos for translating of computing at places like http://www.indlinux.org. Volunteers are needed very badly to take up this work. Other campaigners in this field have stressed the need for editing Netscape s website directory for Konkani at http://dmoz.org.Volunteer are also needed to translate the http://gnuwin.epfl.ch site to Konkani, and to translate the Linux Howto (a guide to free software computing) at http://geocities.com/linuxparichay to konkani. There is also the need for a mailing list where people can talk to teach other on initiatives being undertaken to make Konkani computing a reality. Likewise, theres need for a volunteer to maintain the Konkani section of the Indic computing handbook at http://indic-computing.sourceforge.net More details on this are also available from [EMAIL PROTECTED] Nagarajan from Hewlett-Packard in Bangalore says he has developed a generic transliteration rules framework and library for Indian languages.Says he: I have a basic question out of curiosity do you use multiple scripts within a single Konkani `word? If not, my translib can transliterate each word using a different set of (transliteration rules, fontmap, font) and so you will be able to freely mix all scripts in a single sentence itself. Nagarjan and Joseph Koshy are developing the basic framework to process the different input forms (phonetic, UTF8, inscript, whatever), map them appopriately to glyphs of the chosen scripts and render them using freetype2. 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 ########################################################################## # Send submissions for Goanet to [EMAIL PROTECTED] # # PLEASE remember to stay on-topic (related to Goa), and avoid top-posts # # More details on Goanet at http://joingoanet.shorturl.com/ # # Please keep your discussion/tone polite, to reflect respect to others # ##########################################################################
