There had been major advancements after invention
of the writing system five millennia ago, followed
by another invention of writing a book in 1300
BC and subsequently invention of Gutenberg's Printing
Press in 1450 AD. New information revolution commenced
in 1950, and further spurred with the introduction
of personal computer (PC) in 1971. With the rapid
proliferation of PCs and exponential increase
in bandwidth capacity, the distances shrank, the
information flow increased, but non-uniform participation
of diverse communities resulted into sprawling
digital divide. Latin alphabet based users consisting
of 39% of World population enjoy 84% of Internet
access, whereas Bramhi based scripts users in
south-east Asia and SAARC countries having 22%
of the world population have just 0.3% of Internet
access. At the UNESCO level there is experts committee
on multilingualism and universal access deliberating
these issues. In this context India's efforts
are noteworthy to develop language technology
in collaborative mode for all constitutionally
recognized Indian languages. For major Indian
languages, there is a remarkable success in
developing language technologies such as open
type fonts, basic
information processing tools, text-editor, spell
checker, dictionaries, OCR system, Machine Translation
System, Indian language enabling of LINUX OS, Text-to-Speech,
etc. In academia the R&D work have been rather skewed,
because of lack of emphasis on prototyping and testing in
the real life situations. In order to promote the participation
of industry, Consortium of Indian Language Technologies (COIL-Tech)
was formed with the secretariat at MAIT. This consortium
provides platform for interaction with Government, Academia
& Industry in the field of language technology. COIL-Tech
brought out the
language technology market analysis report highlighting
the
demand. Industry involvement in developing countries
for nonexporting
high-tech activities is difficult. Hence promotional
efforts and incentive schemes need to be worked
out. .more.....
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