[Indic-computing-devel] Please do not forward

[<kut...@ya...>]

http://www.economist.com/printedition/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=2246308

MONITOR 

Open source's local heroes

Dec 4th 2003 
From The Economist print edition

Software: If the commercial sort does not speak your
language, open-source software may well do so instead

ITS POPULARITY is growing around the world, but
open-source software has particular appeal in
developing countries. In China, South Korea, India,
Brazil and other countries, governments are promoting
the use of such software which, unlike the proprietary
kind, allows users to inspect, modify and freely
redistribute its underlying programming instructions.
The open-source approach has a number of attractions.
Adopting open-source software can reduce costs, allay
security concerns and ensure there is no danger of
becoming too dependent on a foreign supplier. But
there is another benefit, too: because it can be
freely modified, open-source software is also easier
to translate, or localise, for use in a particular
language. This involves translating the menus,
dialogue boxes, help files, templates and message
strings to create a new version of the software.

Large software vendors have little incentive to
support any but the most widely spoken languages.
Microsoft, for example, provides its Windows 2000
operating system in 24 languages, and Windows XP in
33. The company also supports over 20 languages in the
latest version of its Office software suite. Yet for
many languages, commercial vendors conclude that
producing a localised product is not economically
viable.

The programmers who produce open-source software
operate by different rules, however. The leading
desktop interfaces for the open-source Linux operating
system—KDE and GNOME—are, between them, available in
more than twice as many languages as Windows. KDE has
already been localised for 42 languages, with a
further 46 in the pipeline. Similarly, Mozilla, an
open-source web browser, now speaks 65 languages, with
34 more to follow. OpenOffice, the leading open-source
office suite, is available in 31 languages, including
Slovenian, Basque and Galician, and Indian languages
such as Gujarati, Devanagari, Kannada and Malayalam.
And another 44 languages including Icelandic, Lao,
Latvian, Welsh and Yiddish are on the way.

Localising software is a tedious job, but some people
are passionate enough about it to resort to unusual
measures. The Hungarian translation of OpenOffice was
going too slowly for Janos Noll, founder of the
Hungarian Foundation for Free Software. So he built
some web-based tools to distribute the workload and
threw a pizza party in the computer room at the
Technical University of Budapest. Over a dozen people
worked locally, with about 100 Hungarians submitting
work remotely over the web. Most of the
work—translating over 21,000 text strings—was
completed in three days.

Dwayne Bailey of translate.org.za, an open-source
translation project based in South Africa, says
localising open-source programs into Zulu, Xhosa,
Venda, Sesotho and other African languages makes
computers more accessible. With translated software,
“these languages are suddenly players in the modern
world.” Neville Alexander, a former South African
freedom-fighter, agrees. “An English-only or even an
English-mainly policy necessarily condemns most
people, and thus the country as a whole, to a
permanent state of mediocrity, since people are unable
to be spontaneous, creative and self-confident if they
cannot use their first language,” he says.

Open source opens doors
 
A similar approach is being taken in India, where
there are 18 official languages and over 1,000
regional dialects. Shikha Pillai is one of the leaders
of a team in Bangalore that is translating open-source
software, including OpenOffice, into ten Indian
dialects. She, too, feels that introducing Indian
languages will help to foster a far deeper penetration
of information technology. “Localisation makes IT
accessible to common people,” she says. “And
Indian-language enabled software could revolutionise
the way our communications work; even the way
computers are used in India.”

In May, Thailand's government launched a subsidised
“people's PC” that runs LinuxTLE, a Thai-language
version of Linux. In September, Japan said it would
join a project established by China and South Korea to
develop localised, open-source alternatives to
Microsoft's software. Computer users around the world
are discovering that open-source software speaks their
language. 

________________________________________________________________________
Yahoo! India Mobile: Download the latest polyphonic ringtones.
Go to http://in.mobile.yahoo.com