Now Software For Vernaculars On Internet
The department of electronics yesterday announced the launch of software for Indian languages free on the Internet as part of a national initiative to promote information technology in Indian languages.
Internet users can now download two specific softwares ALP-Personal and Leap-Lite wordprocessors for major Indian languages free of cost from the Website of Centre for Development of Advanced Computing based in Pune. These two softwares are among several others developed by C-DAC to popularise use of computers in Indian languages.
DoE plans to offer this facility at more sites later, it was announced at a meet on `Technology Development of Indian Languages here. A project for development of Internet tools and technologies for Indian languages has been started with initial focus on Hindi, Shyamal Ghosh, secretary, DoE said inaugurating the meet.
Organisations developing software for use in Indian languages will discuss user feedback on these developments and participation of the industry for packaging and marketing these technologies.
Citing the examples of France and China, Ghosh said emphasis should be on the localisation of softwares and organisations should develop more such softwares and put at least one on the Internet to popularise its usage.
Stressing the need for computer education in Indian languages, V P Bhatkar, executive director, C-DAC, said
Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) standards, Internet browsers and E-mail technology for Indian languages should be developed.
The National Centre for Software Technology (NCST) in Mumbai is working on a software to translate English news stories to Hindi which could be used by news agencies and Hindi newspapers, an NCST official said.
An editor on desk would simplify the complicated sentences in a received news story. The system would accept this story and generate the Hindi translation. A post-editor has to alter the translated story according to his style.
C-DAC is currently working on a English-to-Hindi software for official correspondence and an optical character recognition software for devanagari script which are expected to be completed by June this year, C-DAC officials said.
The C-DAC unit in Bangalore is working on a software for computational rendering of paninian sanskrit grammar to popularise sanskrit.
Giving details of the two C-DAC softwares, officials said the ALP-Personal is DOS-based, while Leap-Lite operates on various versions of windows operating system.
The softwares can be downloaded using the anonymous file transfer protocol.