[Indic-computing-users] From a recent issue of GNULinuxInIndia...

[Frederick N. <fr...@by...>]

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CopyLeft2002 * ISSUE02 * JULY 2002 * CIRCULATE FREELY UNDER GNU/GPL LICENCE
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Co-edited by Frederick Noronha and Parag Mehta <pm at linuxindia dot org>
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******************LOCAL LANGUAGE SOLUTIONS FOR INDIA**********************
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From Kerala, Ajay Kumar <kum...@ya...> who is leading an
initiative to make GNU/Linux friendly to the South Indian language of
Malayalam, says: "The toolkit won't be built from ground-up. Technically
speaking, what we propose to do is to develop a renderer for our language.
Specifically, we are looking for a renderer for Pango. Pango is a
generic-engine used with the GTK toolkit. We are moving fast in this
direction. Some code has already been written in this regard.... One of our
project members is in touch with Jeron Hellingman, who has done most of the
studies regarding Malayalam and Unicode. He has offered to use some of his
works for this project, especially in fonts. That is a major help in our
work."
Ajay Kumar adds that in nine months time, "we want to create an atmosphere
were language computing in Malayalam improves". Says he: "We are confident
that once we deliver the basic framework, others will start localizing more
applications in Malayalam."
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The Problem: India faces a unique local-language computing standardization
and capacity-building problem simply due to the wide variety of regional
and local languages in wide use, and the organizational and regional
obstacles inherent in the effort to standardize this rich variety of
languages. The Strategy: We recommend the creation of a hierarchy of
participatory consortia, which would facilitate broad regional and local
participation in the standardization and development process from a variety
of stake-holders with differing areas of expertise and specialization.  It is
important that these consortia be participatory and inclusive to properly
represent the viewpoint of local developers, users and other stake-holders. 
We recommend the formation of state-level consortia for each regional
language, which should include participants from the following key member
groups: developers, technologists, users/practitioners, linguistic groups...
-- From the Indic-Computing Strategy Document, May 19, 2002 sent in via jace
at pobox dot com
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GNU India Translation Project (GTP) by gnu_india
The localization of GNU/Linux program into the native languages of india the
GNU 's GTP project http://sourceforge.net/projects/gnuindia/
gnu_india at users.sourceforge.net 
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Deepti -- A hindi speaking chat robot by Rahul Jindal
Deepti would be a Hindi (National Language of India) speaking bot, on the
lines of Alice (www.alicebot.org). We shall use or develop a hindi TTS for
the output and more frills as time permits.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/deepti/ rahulj at users.sourceforge.net
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itrans by Avinash Chopde: itrans is a package for printing texts in Indian
languages. It uses English-encoded text for input, and it supports
Devanagari, Gujarati, Telugu, Kannada, Bengali, Tamil, Punjabi, and
Romanized Sanskrit. Input files can be in TeX, LaTeX, HTML, or PostScript
format, and Unicode output is supported. http://www.aczone.com/itrans/
avinash at acm dot org
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Reto of LingoTeach (www.lingoteach.org) says he recently read an article on
GNU/Linux in India "with interest". Reto asks: "Do you know where I can get
linux enthusiast volunteers (don't need to be extremely techinical) for
localization to the Indian languages? I am writing LingoTeach, the GPL
language application (www.lingoteach.org)." Contact re...@re...
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--
Frederick Noronha * Freelance Journalist * Goa * India 832.409490 / 409783
BYTESFORALL www.bytesforall.org  * GNU-LINUX http://linuxinindia.pitas.com
Writing with a difference... on what makes *the* difference