Within Asia’s vast and growing population, diversity abounds. Although Asians have become the most numerous Internet users worldwide as of 2001, access is still largely restricted to those with knowledge of the English language. Residents of rural areas in developing Asian countries are particularly limited by their lack of understanding of English. Efforts to provide Internet infrastructure and training must be complemented by efforts to provide content in languages these users understand.

 

In collaboration with the Centre for Research in Urdu Language Processing (CRULP) in Lahore, Pakistan, the IDRC’s Pan Asia Networking (PAN) program is helping to generate tools to translate internet content into local languages, build capacity for local language computing, and advance policy for local language content creation and access across Asia. Included in this is development of character sets, fonts, spelling and grammar checkers, speech recognition systems, machine translation, and other related local language applications. Armed with the tools to publish online content in local languages, Asian people can create for themselves a comprehensive bank of locally relevant knowledge, resources, and materials.

 

To research and develop a process framework for local language computing development. More specifically, this project aims to:

The first phase of the project will finish in April 2007. There have been some encouraging results to date and a comprehensive survey on the state of localization in Asia has been produced. Country teams have been developed, undergone training and are actively involved in development of local language support in eight languages. Specialized localization centers have also been developed in four countries (Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Laos) through this project, which will add to the sustainability of this effort. These resources are also developing significant technological support for their local languages on both Linux and Microsoft platforms. In addition, both regional secretariat and the country team leaders are actively meeting with regional and national stakeholders to raise awareness of localization and issues hampering its progress. Both private and public organizations are being involved in short-term dialogue to develop policy to address localization actively, so that maximum impact can be made through ICTs for the end-users.