Log on the locals

A pas de deux is a dialogue of love. How can there be conversation if one partner is dumb? - Rudolf Nureyev

We could say that about Internet penetration in India. We boast of being Internet savvy and of our ability to latch on to the latest gadgets and gizmos that can talk to other intelligent communication devices. But of what use, if they talk to only a small tribe of English-speaking people - leaving 800 million people out of the web?

With over 75 crore mobile connections in the country, experts opine that more people would log on to the Net through mobile phones, rather than through computers.

And a local language interface is not only about convenience. Businesses need it in order to reach out to the masses and Governments need it to roll out Internet-based citizen services and financial inclusion programmes. There lies the business opportunity for technology and content companies. Experts feel this could be the real trigger for development of domestic IT industry.

Domain names in regional languages promises to be a game changer, says Desi Valli, Executive Director and Chief Operating Officer of Net 4 India Ltd.

“We stand as the third largest Internet user after China and the US. We could achieve this with only one-fifth of population knowing English. If we could touch a chord with the masses by talking their language, our numbers will shoot up,” he says. In doing so, he sees a huge opportunity for service providers like himself.

Chicken-and-egg situation

Tina Dam, Co-Founder of MyTLD, which provides Top Level Domain management services for companies, industries and governments, says the introduction of domain names in various languages has long been a Catch-22 situation. Is there a demand? And if not, why introduce it.

For her, it all boils down to offering a choice. If content on a site is solely in Hindi (or for that matter any other Indian language), then presumably the address by which it is found would function best in Hindi, as well.

Tina Dam was in Hyderabad recently to educate stakeholders on the need for local domain names at a workshop on `Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs)' organised by CDAC and the National Internet Exchange of India.

The real challenge, both the public and private agencies admit, is speaking the language people are comfortable with. Though companies and organisations have been localising content by creating web sites and portals in regional languages, they still use English in the address bars and in logins and passwords.

That still makes non-English users feel like unwanted guests to the web. After all, one should be able to type out the URLs (the web address) in their own language - in a manner that is easy and user-friendly. One should be able to type out letters using the transliteration option, rather than be compelled to learn clumsy language keyboards.

In order to make that a reality, we need to have in place an entire language ecosystem on which companies and organisations can build web sites that allow people to read and interact in their native languages.

That is easier said than done. It involves a lot of work - you need to understand the nuances and complexities of Indian languages, dig deep into the origins of these languages - Devnagari or Dravidian, or languages with no script.

Fortunately though, these are no longer theoretical questions. CDAC, the IT Ministry agency, has found answers to some of these queries and built solutions. The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, or CDAC, has kicked off a massive exercise to turn it into reality.

“You know just how many different ways, the name Chaudhary is written,” quips Mahesh D Kulkarni, Associate Director and Head of Department of GIST (Graphics and Intelligence-based Script Technology) in CDAC.

Hazard a guess? “Not five, not 10. The name is written in 68 ways,” he answers. And you can only imagine how many variants names such as Upadhyay, Jyothi, Shankar and Maheshwar would have.

Break the ‘English barrier'

Tina Dam lends another perspective. “Preserving languages and thereby culture…Languages change constantly over time and when languages disappear we also lose part of our history and culture. In a country such as India, the language preservation, and choice of using many different languages makes the country an amazing multicultural location, and high importance needs to be attached to it,” she says.

The Internet clearly needs to be globally interoperable. But introducing languages across domain names will greatly advance and ease the access, locally.

Net 4 India's Valli argues that the corporate environment may have adopted English as its preferred medium, but the reach is miniscule compared with the total population. This has limited the local use of technology, and resulted in restricting the use of computers and the Internet largely within the English-speaking population.

“If this barrier is to be broken, the only way is to make the technology compatible with the market environment, rather than expecting the market to adapt to the existing technology environment,” he observes.

Unless the local language is integrated into the system, large sections of the community will not migrate to the Internet, he adds.

CDAC, which is driving the language web initiative, has laid down certain dos-and-don'ts for firms as they choose domain names. For the record, in a web site, say www.abcdef.in, www is called Universal Locator, abcdef is the subdomain and .in is called TLD or Top Level Domain (TLD).

Similar looking names and mixing of languages is not allowed. No language numerals, either. Nor can local punctuation be used. CDAC has also developed browser independent fonts for supporting IDNs in Indian languages. To make those letters easy on the eye, it has introduced equal looking letters.

“Unlike English, Indian languages have complex mixing of letters. That poses a challenge in achieving equal-looking letters in the small space meant for domain names,” says Kulkarni. CDAC has taken permission from ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) for launching IDNs in at least seven languages over the next few months. ICANN has now decided to allow country names and institutional names. It has also permitted new gTLDs (Generic Top Level Domain Names), which were previously limited to a handful of extensions such as .edu, .com, .org. So one can apply for a company name or a city.

Soon, you can also apply for extensions ‘.your name'. But ICANN makes it a point to restrict proper names of cities to the official administrators of those cities. For instance, .Mumbai or .Bombay can only be registered by the Mumbai municipal authority or the State Government. “But the authority should make it a point to register all the variants in order to pre-empt squatters,” says Kulkarni.

CDAC has also built-in checks and balances to keep tabs on cyber squatters. (A cyber squatter is someone who sits on a popular domain by registering it, hoping to sell it for a bargain or to drive traffic to his site.)

Role for private firms

Valli of Net4India argues that the technology companies too are addressing the existing needs and not attempting to carve new markets. That has created almost a vacuum for solutions that suit the local needs.

“We, as a platform provider for web content, should be technically capable of enabling local language content. Net4 currently has made its environment Indic-ready. We support all languages as part of our hosted offerings,” he says, adding that the company actively participates and contributes to technical developments in various Indian languages.

That said, lack of content poses a major challenge. There are institutions that are involved in development of the ecosystem, including addressing the issue of content. For instance, the International Institute of Information Technology (Hyderabad) along with other partners has developed ‘Sampark' — the machine translation solution in major Indian languages.

Multinational technology companies too are doing their bit. Microsoft has launched Indic programme to make computing easier for those who only know vernacular languages.

Google has developed a robust transliteration tool allowing users of major non-English languages to type out mails and documents. Social networking site Facebook too allows keying-in local content.

>kurmanath@thehindu.co.in

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