21st September 2004 localisation and the digital divide 1

and the

Development and the Information SocietyEconomic dividesLanguage dividesCultural divides

Sustainable development

21st September 2004 localisation and the digital divide 2

national development and WSIS

• contrast in per capita income.– GDP 1997 - DCs $19,285; world $3,610; LDCs $245– poverty line $1 a day - Zambia 84.6% (GDP $300)

• Countries need to develop– To be like the West? Linear process?– Join the information society

• World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS)– “information and communication technologies (ICT) are

among the most important contributors to growth and sustainable development”

– “challenge is to make ICT available and affordable”

21st September 2004 localisation and the digital divide 3

Economic divide

Zambia 0.19% internet, 0.67% PCs (US 35%, 59%)• Communications networks limited

– good backbone between centres, missing ‘last mile’

• Cost of computers too high– Bangalore SIMPUTER – $ 200, Berkeley PCtvt – $ 250– SOLO – rugged but costly ($1000)– recycled computers

• Maybe founded on wrong model of ownership– Telecentres and kiosks, Share email addresses

• Software and Intellectual Property Rights

21st September 2004 localisation and the digital divide 4

Language divide

• The normal objective of localisation– Well understood industrialised process

• identify text – extract – translate - replace

• BUT– 6000 plus languages

• most unwritten

• writing systems need encoding with inevitable compromises

• adult literacy may be as low as 15% (50% globally, Nepal 35%!)

– lots of politics• dominant languages suppress others, eg. Nepal

• sometimes perverse, eg Pakistan

– endangered languages, can we save them?

21st September 2004 localisation and the digital divide 5

writing systems

by R.K.Joshi, Mumbai

Roman system simplifiedby technology

quality of fonts importantthere is a fine tradition of calligraphy in South Asiaand Islam

writing systems created for one use

by scholars and researchersneed local standardisation

21st September 2004 localisation and the digital divide 6

Eg. the languages of South Asia

Pushtu

English pervasive- only 5%

Hindi

Tibetan

Urdu

Bangla

Sinhala

Tamil

Kasmiri

Punjabi DzongkaNepali

Sindhi

Gujurati

Telugu

Malayalam

Kannada

Marathi

Assamese

OriyaOver 500 languages17 official in India

Tibeto-Burmese

Dravidian

Indo-European

Indo-EuropeanTibeto-

Burmese

scholarshipSanskrit

Farsi

large diaspora

21st September 2004 localisation and the digital divide 7

Nepal language politics

• Gorkhali (later Nepali) official language since ~1750– mother tongue of ruling elite– 1950-1990 ‘one nation, one culture, one language’

• around 100 other languages– Nepali now almost universally spoken

• and in neighbouring regions

– 5 other languages with mature written traditions– 60 completely unwritten

• 1990 enabled other mother-tongue education• 2003 mandating mother-tongue teaching

– but where is the money for this?

21st September 2004 localisation and the digital divide 8

Pakistan language politics

• Urdu official language since 1947/8– mother tongue to 7.57%

– privileged by law and finance

• closely related to Hindi– just different scripts

– Urdu-Hindi is second only to Chinese

• Punjabi seen as a liability– mother tongue to 44.5%

• 58 other indigenous languages

• English language of elite– and globalisation

21st September 2004 localisation and the digital divide 9

the content divide

• India 1.5 M websites in English• 20,000 in Indian languages“The new technology has also made us slaves of a

new type of ‘information colonialism’. One which encourages us to think that the centre of the world is somewhere in Europe or the US.” Frederick Noronha in www.i4donline.net June 2004

21st September 2004 localisation and the digital divide 10

the literacy divide

• an illiterate person is ‘text-blind’ but can see its layout and see the graphics. – enable receipt of written information through Text-to-

Speech generation– enable contribution of written information through

speech recognition

• but why not base the technology on speech?– no need for written form– works for all languages

• plus lots of graphics

21st September 2004 localisation and the digital divide 11

Cultural and Social Divide

• Standard localisation for dates, numbers, etc– but what about lakhs and crores?– other date systems?

• Software embeds (best) western practice– ERP systems taken as unproblematic– problems even within Europe

• Cultural models– Hofstede’s four dimensions

21st September 2004 localisation and the digital divide 12

Sustainable Development

• country must be able to do it all for themselves– this means education in underpinning knowledge

• basic software technologies– Unicoded writing system

– open source developments

• language resources– language corpora

– dictionary to standardise spelling

• ethno-methods– locally produced software

21st September 2004 localisation and the digital divide 13

NeLRaLEC – proposal to the EU

• for Nepali, though not endangered• written in Devanagari (almost) – in Unicode• already couple of OT fonts, and Nepali Linux• produce

– Nepali National Corpus– Nepali dictionary– basic office software in Nepali

• including spell checkers

– speech generation

• trials in schools• computational linguistics course in University

21st September 2004 localisation and the digital divide 14

Conclusions

• will lack of technology help kill languages?

• what would computers be like had they been invented in another part of the world?

• enable people to localise imported software and websites, or create their own

• local Open Source movements very promising but not sufficient