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The International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Canada, through its Pan Asia Networking (PAN) program and National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences (NUCES), Pakistan, through its Centre for Research in Urdu Language Processing (CRULP) are pleased to announce their initial three-year partnership in a South and South-East Asia wide initiative to build capacity in regional institutions for local language computing.

Click here to see PAN Localization web site shown below

While Asians have become the largest group of Internet users by the end 2001, they barely form 4.5% of the region's total population. The region's diversity of languages makes information in the English language largely inaccessible to an overwhelming majority of under-developed rural Asian populations that do not speak and write English.

Investment has gone into developing the ICT infrastructure in Asia, but the persisting digital divide attests that the path towards providing connectivity and technology infrastructure alone would still not enable a majority of population to benefit from the current availability of information. What is required is to enable the large under-developed populations of Asia to access and publish content in the languages that they speak and write in, on a daily basis. Access equates to providing local language computing framework and tools to ultimately translate and display this information in the languages spoken by these large potential users. Publishing content means using these tools to generate information in the required local languages. Inability to do computing in local languages is a major obstacle to providing universal access to information and learning, both basic human rights.

The PAN Localization Research Project has three broad objectives:

• to develop sustainable human resource capacity in the Asian region for R&D in local language technology

  The human resource pool in most developing Asian countries needs capacity-building to become skilled in enhancing the existing technology to support their Asian languages.

• to raise current levels of technological support for Asian languages

  Asian languages are in some aspects much more complex than English, some with very complex writing systems. The current technology, initially developed to support English, does not completely support the requirements of many Asian languages and needs to be developed.

• to advance policy for local language content creation and access across Asia for development

  Few studies examine local language problems to devise and recommend effective policy framework to address problems related to accessibility and publication of relevant content through ICTs and devise short-term and long-term solutions.