Diversity
Domain names in Indian languages soon
October 22, 2007,Indiatimes Infotech
With initial registration beginning in early 2008, Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs) are opening up to the Indian market. The first domain names, available in Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, Punjabi and Sanskrit, aim to promote diffusion and accessibility of the Internet to rural areas, by facilitating websites' use of local languages in domain names as well as content. However, the opening up of IDNs to India also faces many challenges.
Reading out of the "Idiot Box": Same-language subtitling on television in India
2005, Brij Kothari, Avinash Pandey & Amita R. Chudgar, MIT Press Journal
Same Language Subtitling (SLS) is the idea of subtitling the lyrics of song based television programs (e.g., music videos), in the same language as the audio. Situated in a literature review of subtitling, this article describes the first-ever implementation of SLS on a TV program of film songs, specifically for first-language literacy. Chitrageet, a weekly 30-minute TV program of Gujarati film songs, was telecast across Gujarat state in India, with the lyrics subtitled in Gujarati. The article discusses the results of the pilot study to test the effectiveness of SLS of film songs on the reading skills of out-of-school people.
Kerala villages to find their own space in cyber world
May 2, 2007, UNESCO
The state government of Kerala through its state wide ICT project Akshaya with support from UNESCO is going to create community portals in the local language (Malayalam). The portal will comprise vital information such as government schemes, information regarding agriculture, business ventures, products, local job vacancies, educational details, health information, legal rights and so on.
Yahoo launches local-language chat in India
October 20, 2006, Amy Yee, Financial Times
Yahoo! is joining the growing trend of localisation, i.e. programmes developed for regional languages, with the launch of its local language chat in India. The new program allows users to chat in Hindi and Tamil without any need for a language keyboard by typing phonetically on the English keyboard, which will automatically be converted to the vernacular scripts.
Yahoo to launch new portals in Indian languages
October 2, 2006, Times Of India
Up to six new Indian language portals will be launched in the next few weeks as Yahoo! moves to further enter the Indian market. Additionally, the company will expand its R&D centre in Bangalore to 1000 employees from the current 800.
India lays down 'open' challenge
May 12, 2006, Bill Thompson, BBC
This columnist describes his interactions with Indian programmers who are using the freedom of Linux distribution licences to create instrumental technologies themselves. He believes India is beginning a new phase in its use of free and open source software. This work is more than just adapting code from the US and Europe, it includes "localising" code by incorporating local languages.
