Download Localisation and the digital divide

and the
Development and the Information Society
Economic divides
Language divides
Cultural divides
Sustainable development
21st September 2004
localisation and the digital divide
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national development and WSIS
• contrast in per capita income.
– GDP 1997 - DCs $19,285; world $3,610; LDCs $245
– poverty line $1 a day - Zambia 84.6% (GDP $300)
• Countries need to develop
– To be like the West? Linear process?
– Join the information society
• World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS)
– “information and communication technologies (ICT) are
among the most important contributors to growth and
sustainable development”
– “challenge is to make ICT available and affordable”
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Economic divide
Zambia 0.19% internet, 0.67% PCs (US 35%, 59%)
• Communications networks limited
– good backbone between centres, missing ‘last mile’
• Cost of computers too high
– Bangalore SIMPUTER – $ 200, Berkeley PCtvt – $ 250
– SOLO – rugged but costly ($1000)
– recycled computers
• Maybe founded on wrong model of ownership
– Telecentres and kiosks, Share email addresses
• Software and Intellectual Property Rights
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Language divide
• The normal objective of localisation
– Well understood industrialised process
• identify text – extract – translate - replace
• BUT
– 6000 plus languages
• most unwritten
• writing systems need encoding with inevitable compromises
• adult literacy may be as low as 15% (50% globally, Nepal 35%!)
– lots of politics
• dominant languages suppress others, eg. Nepal
• sometimes perverse, eg Pakistan
– endangered languages, can we save them?
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writing systems
Roman system simplified
by technology
quality of fonts important
there is a fine tradition of
calligraphy in South Asia
and Islam
writing systems created for
one use
by scholars and researchers
need local standardisation
by R.K.Joshi, Mumbai
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Eg. the languages of South Asia
Pushtu
scholarship
Sanskrit
Tibetan
Farsi
Tibeto-Burmese
Kasmiri
Indo-European
Urdu
Punjabi
Nepali
Hindi
Indo-European
Sindhi
Dzongka
Assamese
Bangla
Gujurati
Over 500 languages
17 official in India
Oriya
Marathi
Telugu
Kannada
Dravidian
large diaspora
TibetoBurmese
Malayalam
Tamil
English pervasive
- only 5%
Sinhala
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Nepal language politics
• Gorkhali (later Nepali) official language since ~1750
– mother tongue of ruling elite
– 1950-1990 ‘one nation, one culture, one language’
• around 100 other languages
– Nepali now almost universally spoken
• and in neighbouring regions
– 5 other languages with mature written traditions
– 60 completely unwritten
• 1990 enabled other mother-tongue education
• 2003 mandating mother-tongue teaching
– but where is the money for this?
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Pakistan language politics
• Urdu official language since 1947/8
– mother tongue to 7.57%
– privileged by law and finance
• closely related to Hindi
– just different scripts
– Urdu-Hindi is second only to Chinese
• Punjabi seen as a liability
– mother tongue to 44.5%
• 58 other indigenous languages
• English language of elite
– and globalisation
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the content divide
• India 1.5 M websites in English
• 20,000 in Indian languages
“The new technology has also made us slaves of a
new type of ‘information colonialism’. One which
encourages us to think that the centre of the
world is somewhere in Europe or the US.”
Frederick Noronha in www.i4donline.net June 2004
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the literacy divide
• an illiterate person is ‘text-blind’ but can see its
layout and see the graphics.
– enable receipt of written information through Text-toSpeech generation
– enable contribution of written information through
speech recognition
• but why not base the technology on speech?
– no need for written form
– works for all languages
• plus lots of graphics
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Cultural and Social Divide
• Standard localisation for dates, numbers, etc
– but what about lakhs and crores?
– other date systems?
• Software embeds (best) western practice
– ERP systems taken as unproblematic
– problems even within Europe
• Cultural models
– Hofstede’s four dimensions
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Sustainable Development
• country must be able to do it all for themselves
– this means education in underpinning knowledge
• basic software technologies
– Unicoded writing system
– open source developments
• language resources
– language corpora
– dictionary to standardise spelling
• ethno-methods
– locally produced software
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NeLRaLEC – proposal to the EU
•
•
•
•
for Nepali, though not endangered
written in Devanagari (almost) – in Unicode
already couple of OT fonts, and Nepali Linux
produce
– Nepali National Corpus
– Nepali dictionary
– basic office software in Nepali
• including spell checkers
– speech generation
• trials in schools
• computational linguistics course in University
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Conclusions
• will lack of technology help kill languages?
• what would computers be like had they been
invented in another part of the world?
• enable people to localise imported software and
websites, or create their own
• local Open Source movements very promising
but not sufficient
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