21st September 2004localisation and the digital divide1 and the Development and the Information Society Economic divides Language divides Cultural divides Sustainable development

21st September 2004localisation and the digital divide2 national development and WSIS contrast in per capita income. –GDP 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 2004localisation and the digital divide3 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 addresses Software and Intellectual Property Rights

21st September 2004localisation and the digital divide4 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 2004localisation and the digital divide5 writing systems by R.K.Joshi, Mumbai Roman system simplified by technology quality of fonts important there is a fine tradition of calligraphy in South Asia and Islam writing systems created for one use by scholars and researchers need local standardisation

21st September 2004localisation and the digital divide6 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 Oriya Over 500 languages 17 official in India Tibeto-Burmese Dravidian Indo-European Tibeto- Burmese scholarship Sanskrit Farsi large diaspora

21st September 2004localisation and the digital divide7 Nepal language politics Gorkhali (later Nepali) official language since ~1750 –mother tongue of ruling elite – ‘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 2004localisation and the digital divide8 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 2004localisation and the digital divide9 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 June 2004

21st September 2004localisation and the digital divide10 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 2004localisation and the digital divide11 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 2004localisation and the digital divide12 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 2004localisation and the digital divide13 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 2004localisation and the digital divide14 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