Deepak Aryal

Kathmandu:

Asians have become the largest group of Internet users representing 4.5 per cent of the region’s total population. The diversity of languages makes information in the English language largely inaccessible to the majority of under-developed rural Asian populations that do not speak and write English.

Investment are made to develop the Information Technology (IT) infrastructures, but the persisting digital divide attests that the path towards providing connectivity and technology infrastructure alone would still not enable the large population of Asia to access and publish content in the languages that they speak and write.

Access equates to using local language computing framework and tools to translate and display this information in the languages spoken by the users. Publishing content means using these tools to generate information in the required local languages. Inability to compute in local languages is a major obstacle to providing universal access to information and learning, both basic human rights.

First, you must learn English to use a computer. How can you learn this easily? English for computers keeps afar users or those Nepalis who cannot read, write and understand English.

Even though the price of computers have been decreasing dramatically over the last few years, there is still a ‘class barrier’ that avoids the use of computer because of lingual access. The use of Nepali Devanagiri font remains limited to some agencies which have modified software that is not adaptable to general use.

The reason for this limitation is that the various fonts that have been developed are not ‘standardised’. This means that the code given to individual characters on the different fonts are not uniform. The various Nepalis fonts are incompatible to transfering data and information from one to another.

“Customers ask for information in the Nepali language on the Internet, but how is it possible? We can’t fulfill their needs,” says Ramesh Karki, proprietor of Kantipur Chat Zone, Naya Bazaar. This problem was felt not only by Karki but also by writer Bishnu Prabhat who was working on a research. He tried to search for names of some old books from websites in the Nepali language.

But he was not able to access such information from any site. Finally, he came to know that the Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya (MPP) has such information and tried to get it from different cyber shops but cyber owners had no idea about the use of Nepali language on the Internet.

MPP in collaboration with UNDP and the Ministry of Science and Technology accomplished a Font Standardisation Project by writing a Unicode-based Nepali version of the Devanagiri keyboard input system in two different versions. Users can view the document in any platform without any trouble of conversion using Unicode font.

Unicode Project director Amar Gurung says that the new system gives uniformity between different Nepali font faces based on the Unicode system and opens new possibilities in IT sector. “A person, who does not know English can use the facility as all the menus, command and interface will appear in Nepali. This is a revolution. Now, we have to promote it by adding extra features,” explains Gurung.

Unicode, internationalised domain names, allows the Internet user to have URLs in their own languages. With the help of Unicode, small linguistic communities all over the world get mainstream software in their own language.

However, Bikram Shrestha, coordinator, Centre for Software Development and Research at Kantipur City College explains, “Unicode based Nepali font ensures logical and scientific data input, but this system requires a minimum of Windows 2000 or XP.” Project engineer, Paras Pradhan, is working on the Nepali distribution of Linux which may be effective.

Web designer Ram KC says, “This is a step towards the future, but it is not enough. Many programmes don’t support Unicode, but we use it because it was made for us. Advancement of the font can help develop the website in Nepali language because we had a big problem managing Nepali text in websites.”

Nepali Devanagari in Unicode makes it possible for users to use the computer for email, chatting, data processing and other activities. The possibilities open up on the use of Nepali language on the web.

“Any software or operating system won’t develop seeing our problems,” says Vivek Raj Maurya, multimedia teacher in Kantipur City College.

He says, “No one will develop the system for us but international companies cannot neglect the Indian market. Definitely, they will develop programmes that can support different Indian languages which is quite similar to the Devanagiri script. It is an opportunity and we have to be able to catch it.”

The time has come to do develop technology and to acquire knowledge and information easily. The concept of distance learning is not possible without lingual access through the computer system. Development of sustainable technology in the Asian region is necessary to raise current level of technological support for Asian languages.

Asian languages are in some aspects more complex than English, 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.

Development of character set, collation and other language standards, fonts, lexical, spell checkers, grammar checkers, search and replace utilities, speech recognition systems, text to speech synthesis, machine translation can bring the revolution in IT sector. Many users wait for such opportunity. If this should happen, many will have access to a world of information.