Marathi and Computer - vpmthane

1 Marathi and Computer Alka Irani Chief Investigator IndiXII, Senior Research Scientist, C-DAC, Mumbai, with implementation support from Swapnil Hajare et al of janabhaaratii (funded by TDIL, MC&T, Govt of India). C-DAC, Mumbai (formerly NCST) UNDP defines human development as Marathi , Computer and Internet expanding the choices for all people in society. Marathi is a language with rich heritage This ensures the creation of an enabling and abundant literature. For most of the environment in which all can enjoy long, people in rural Maharashtra (educated or healthy and creative lives. IT can be used to uneducated) this is the only language of promote education, learning, communication communication. Therefore when one thinks and networking, neither technology nor of using computers for public health, rural products can be taken off-the-shelf from other development, education, e-governance and countries, because the conditions, needs and media along with enabling computers to read, languages are radically different.

2 Write, print Marathi text, the interactions with Given the present financial, technical and Computer , the help material etc. and most linguistic constraints there is an urgent need important the contents to share among to improve the conditions for equitable and community members need to be in Marathi and affordable access to computers so that the in the script used by Marathi Devanagari. benefits of IT are distributed across all sections We can see quite a few websites in of the society. Marathi . Most of the Marathi newspapers . It is said that No man is an island'. In the Loksatta, Maharashtra Times, have their e- same way, according to me, the days of stand- copy on Internet. alone computers are over. Computers all over A question to ponder over is how many the world are networked to form Internet. This Marathi speaking people are using Computers new, dynamic, flexible, powerful medium called for interaction (chat) in Marathi or for sending `Internet' is dominated by one language.

3 Mails (e-mail) in Marathi . According to a survey, 85 % of the contents on Internet are in English while less than 5 % Education and Computer of people speak English as their first language. The conventional education system is Collaborative content development for unable to cope with the rapidly changing Marathi The need information needs of the education domain. The vast Knowledge Base available in foreign We Indians are proud of Eastern languages can reach masses only if it is made Civilization but are in great danger of losing available in local languages. Currently, the the advantage our rich civilization has if we educators are unequipped to handle the rapid don't preserve our cultural heritage. pace at which the Information world is moving. Language and culture go hand in hand. If the current model of teaching is to be Currently, Indian software professionals are sustained continuous input to the educator's busy making unbelievable progress on all knowledge and a continuous collaborative fronts of computerisation all over the world but learning mechanism must be available to as far as our own cultural repository is them.

4 Getting familiar with this new medium concerned our contribution is naganya will make their job easy and enjoyable. Once (insignificant). they have their lessons neatly organised and kept, it will not be necessary to go through the O g JUH$ Am{U _amR>r O. 12. process of preparing presentation all over ( Multiple layers (that can be merged or again. They can make incremental changes. separated as per the need) building Many of the mundane day-to-day jobs like various hierarchies, abstractions must be keeping track of students, their activities, possible. progress can be minimal. Email is a cheap and ( Contents should be attractive to view affordable medium for information exchange (education should be fun). With use of while web-pages can be used for publishing multimedia it is possible. as well as for bulletin boards. ( Contents management systems should Computer , local languages and have provision for entering/retrieving Employment opportunities: contents for disable people.)))}

5 This means Ample employment opportunities are visual or speech interfaces should be available, the need is to make local languages possible. like Marathi successfully to computers. Many ( Content units should be distributed at the Government offices are confronted with the same time fairly independent to allow task of working in Indian languages. The content developers work independent of nationwide project PURA on initiative of our Computer Network when it is not President and a great visionary Abdul Kalam accessible for Providing Urban amenities for Rural Areas is already working in that direction. If The Scenario competent people (teachers/students) are Many stand-alone packages for bi-lingual gathered, and resources are provided, text input exist. The two important landmark educational contents for rural settings can be achievements in 80's from CDAC are: developed using local skills.)

6 Contents will be understood much better as they are written - Rupantar (Software solution). by the people having similar cultural The rupantar phonetic coding scheme background (peer learning). Local was designed during early 1980s at a newspapers, magazines/TV channels need lot time when there was no Devanagari text- of contents to be input, edited and produced processor available for inputting the text;. in local languages. the PC revolution had not caught up and Computer and contents most of the work was done on main machines of Digital at NCST. Computer is an ideal medium for content management. With drastic reduction in costs It was designed during development of of disk drives and invention of many transliteration softwares Swaroop and affordable, flexible, compact storing devices then Rupantar which were basically like pen drives, the contents can be stored Computer -based systems for converting efficiently in compact format in a way they can names written in English script into be accessed anytime, anywhere.

7 Devanagari equivalents. Some desirable characteristics of contents Transliteration of the entire English are: Telephone Dictionary in Marathi , sorting and made it ready for printing; also used ( Contents should be in standardized the scheme for printing cheques, printing formats. For a collaborative framework certificates, etc. to succeed, the methods and conventions used must be stable, - GIST (Hardware Solution). universal and scalable. The Graphic and Intelligence based ( Multiple ways of organising, viewing, Script Technology (GIST) group of C- browsing data must be possible DAC, Pune has introduced a GIST card O g JUH$ Am{U _amR>r O. 13. for inputting Indian characters on DOS Sybase, Unisys etc. Unicode is required platform. by modern standards such as XML and The GIST card has been the cornerstone Java. It is supported in many operating of some of the most crucial systems, all modern browsers, and many computerization programs of India such other products.))}

8 The emergence of the as the Land Records Program, the Unicode Standard, and the availability of Election Commission Identity cards, and tools supporting it, are among the most citizen surveys. significant recent global software technology trends. - Standardisation Incorporating Unicode into client-server Fundamentally, computers just deal with or multi-tiered applications and websites numbers. They store letters and other offers significant cost savings over the characters by assigning a number for use of legacy character sets. Unicode each one called encoding of the enables a single software product or a character. Currently there are two single website to be targeted across standards for devanagari encoding on multiple platforms, languages and computers. countries without re-engineering. It allows ISCII ISCII is an Indian national data to be transported through many standard for character encoding which different systems without corruption.

9 Was revised many times. The ISCII-91 (Unicode and ISCII standards differ. ISCII. code retains the standard ASCII code is a 8-bit character encoding, Unicode 32- while utilizing the upper ASCII codes for bit character encoding. Unicode was Indian scripts. This makes it feasible to based on ISCII-88.) The latest ISCII. use Indian scripts along with English Standard is ISCII-91. computers and software in an 8-bit environment. However, even today many standalone packages text processors for inputting The ISCII code table is a superset of all text and printing with their own the characters required in the 10 Brahmi- encodings. based Indian scripts including Devanagari. These scripts share a large What was done to enhance quality, number of structural features between inclusiveness, diversity at NCST (now C- them as a consequence of their common DAC Mumbai).

10 Brahmi origin. The two recent projects at NCST (now - Unicode: character encoding C-DAC, Mumbai) is a step in right direction to make Indian Language pro available to Before Unicode was invented, there were masses on computers and Internet. hundreds of different encoding systems for assigning these numbers. No single 1. IndiX enabling the medium for encoding could contain enough reading/writing Marathi characters. These encoding systems also The basic IndiX agenda is that the text conflicted with one another. processing should be as easy as it is for Unicode provides a unique number for English user. The technological challenges every character, no matter what the addressed by IndiX is to identify the minimal, platform, no matter what the program, no logical and required changes in Indic text matter what the language. The Unicode processing and embed these changes within Standard has been adopted by Apple, HP, the lower most level of a widely used and IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Sun, deployed software architecture GNU/LINUX.