LANGUAGE IN INDIA

TECHNOLOGY FOR INDIC SCRIPTS - A USER PERSPECTIVE
Renu Gupta, Ph.D.

TECHNOLOGY FOR INDIC SCRIPTS LAGGING BEHIND

Although Indians represent a sizable market for computers and mobile phones, the technology for typing and displaying text in Indic scripts has lagged far behind the demand.

The main hurdles have been

(a) the nature of the Indic scripts and
(b) the lack of compatibility across software providers.

FOCUS OF THIS PAPER -- EXAMINATION OF THREE INPUT DEVICES

This paper examines three input devices –manual typewriters, computer keyboards, and mobile phone keypads—that have modified existing models for English. It compares these with the technology developed for typing text in Japanese.

CHALLENGE AND RESPONSE - PROBLEMS FACED BY WRITERS

In 2005, when I was writing about the scripts used in India, I faced difficulties typing the paper. The paper was written in English with examples from Urdu, Hindi, and Japanese. Two word processing programs— Microsoft Word and LaTeX —could handle words in English as well as Japanese; but when I tried to added Devanagari, MS-Word did not even offer this option and LaTeX crashed. Now, a year later in 2006, the technology has advanced to the point where I can type a paper in three or more scripts; however, there is no guarantee that readers can view these scripts on their computer or on the web, which is why the paper is available only as a pdf file.

TECHNOLOGY AVAILABLE FOR INDIAN SCRIPTS FROM A USER'S PERSPECTIVE

In this paper I examine the technology available for Indian scripts from a user’s perspective. The paper describes three input devices for Indic scripts—the manual typewriter, the computer keyboard, and the mobile phone keypad—which are modifications of existing devices for English. These are then compared to their equivalents for typing in Japanese, where innovative solutions had to be designed to handle the complex writing system.

Between 1994 and 1995, Internet services and mobile phones became available in India. These enabled Indians to communicate instantly across distances through the written medium, using email on computers and text messaging on mobile phones (which was cheaper than a phone call). Since the introduction of these services, the number of users has increased dramatically; from 5 million users in 2000, the number of internet users in India jumped to more than 50 million by the end of 2005 (Internet World Statistics, 2006) and the number of mobile phone users stood at 96.9 million by the end of April 2006 (TRAI, 2006).

CIRCUMVENTING THE PROBLEMS

Despite these growing numbers, resources for typing and viewing text in Indian scripts have not kept pace. Until recently, there was neither any hardware nor software to help the general user to type, display, or view texts in Indic scripts either for SMS messages or on computers (here I am excluding packages such as LaTeX that require special commands and do not have a graphical user interface). Indians circumvented this problem by typing their messages either in English or in an Indian language — but in the only script available, which was the Roman script.

Little attention was paid to Indians who needed or wanted to type in their own languages; instead, Indian software programmers focused on writing programs for English language software. In discussing the lack of ‘vernacular software’, Keniston (2001) argues that software companies assumed that the Indians who could afford computers knew English. He cites Harsh Kumar of BharatBhasha who pointed out that small-and medium-sized merchants want Indian language computers for their businesses, but in the absence of supply there is no demand. Since then, businesses have recognized the need and attention is being directed toward developing software for users to type in Indian languages on computers and mobile phones.

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Renu Gupta

The Morphodynamics of Bengali Compounds - Decomposing Them for Lexical Processing | The Ringed Realities | In Search of Identity - A Case Study of Tamil Christians | Practicing Literary Translation: A Symposium Round 9 | The English Language Teacher's Awareness and Perceptions | Technology for Indic Scripts - A User Perspective | HOME PAGE OF JULY 2006 ISSUE | HOME PAGE | CONTACT EDITOR