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.
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.
Localization Project aims at the development of character set,
collation and other language standards, fonts, lexica, spell checkers, grammar
checkers, search and replace utilities, speech recognition systems,
text-to-speech synthesis, machine translation. The Project will assess both
Linux and Microsoft platforms for these specific application developments.
Different aspects of localization technology will be addressed, including
linguistic standardization, computing applications, development platforms,
content publishing and access, and effective marketing and dissemination and
intellectual property right strategies of the output products. [See
As the PAN Localization
Project will research into problems and solutions for local language computing
across Asia for development, it is designed to sample the cultural and
linguistic diversity in the whole region. The spread of the research will
be carried out by the various countries at strategically different research
entry points along the research spectrum, with each country conducting research
that is critical in terms of the applications that need to be delivered to the
country’s user market.
The Project will also build
an Asian network of researchers to share learning and knowledge and will publish
research outputs including a comprehensive review at the end of the Project,
documenting effective processes, results and recommendations.
The countries (and languages)
included in the Project are Afghanistan (Pashto, Dari), Bangladesh (Bangla), Bhutan (Dzongkha), Cambodia
(Khmer), Laos (Lao), Nepal (Nepali) and Sri Lanka (Sinhala, Tamil).
The implementers of the
Project are ICT researchers, practitioners, linguists and policy-makers from
government agencies, universities and the private sector. In addition to
PAN and CRULP, the following are the participating institutions in this Project: