[Indic-computing-users] Interesting... sounds like our problems...

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

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Message: 1
   Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2002 17:18:36 +0800
   From: "Susan Ellison-McGee" <sm...@ad...>
Subject: Re: Fw: Khmer Script on the internet


Just wanted to add one more item to this discussion.  Aizu Izumi from
GLOCOM, a Japanese group that is part of the DOT Force gave an interesting
presentation on what has happened in putting Khmer Script on the Internet.

I can't locate his presentation (which was made at one of the civil society
sessions of the World Summit on the Information Society Preparatory
Committee), but here is a brief excerpt from a report that GLOCOM and the
Japanese non-profit community have prepared for the DOTForce,
http://www.glocom.ac.jp/dotforce/20010417glocomcommentto20.html

"A recent case in Khmer language characters used by Cambodian people
illustrates the difficult nature of these challenges. The existing Khmer
language code was developed without sufficient participation by native
Cambodian people, and was proposed and adopted by the Unicode Forum, a
private consortium, then transferred to ISO (International Standard
Organization) and became legitimate international standard almost
automatically. Now, a new and vastly improved code (and input system) has
been developed mostly by a Japanese volunteer, endorsed by a Cambodian
government agency, but there is no formal mechanism available to appeal to
ISO or the Unicode Forum for the people and government of Cambodia. This is
not really a technical problem; it is rather a social and international,
business problem. Microsoft, for example, adopts most of Unicode forum's
output as the de facto standard and so it becomes the basis for that
language in the Microsoft operating system, Internet Explorer and Netscape
browsers, etc.) To change existing standard into new one involves
considerable investment in time and money."

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