The Indian consumers have witnessed a drastic change in the way they have been consuming information, thanks to devices like PCs, laptops, mobile phones and Internet. According to Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) January 2012, it is estimated that as many as 121 million Indians are logged onto the Internet. Although the number is quite encouraging, still,it is relatively a smaller proportion of the country's vast population. However, it is interesting to note that there has been 25-per cent growth in the Internet users in India over the past 12 months, while the number of rural Indians using the Internet account to approximately 2 per cent only. IAMAI also expects the India's Internet population to reach 300 million users by 2015.
Another report released in November 2011 by IAMAI states that 302 million individuals live in the urban cities, of which 38 per cent know how to operate a computer. This number has grown from 32 per cent in 2009. 72 per cent of the computer literates claim to have used the Internet ever. 79 per cent of these are actively accessing the Internet, at least once in the past one month.
Market Challenges
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Rajesh Thadani, Director, Consumer Business Segment, Lenovo India, opines, "One of the biggest challenges is to make PCs more relevant for an average lower-middle class Indian. Most urban Indians use computers for e-mail, instant messaging, social networking and Searching, but these services are less relevant in the rural context. Potential users, therefore, do not see significant value in investing in a PC." Various pre-requisites for using PC/Internet like the required infrastructure, including electricity supply, Internet connection, etc, which are not readily available outside top few cities further spice up the scene.
Besides the frequent info seekers reside in the urban India, one can't deny the fact that there is a huge population waiting for the information to reach them. Yes, I am talking about rural India. They need information about the world outside their village, the importance of education, basic weather forecast, info on crops, pesticides and fertilizers, the various means that could help them to grow.
Could Localization help?
Over the years, mobile devices have drastically changed the way we communicate and stay connected with people. New technologies, platforms and web-based solutions have helped consumers today to stay abreast with the latest information as well as communicate 24x7. This, coupled with Internet penetration and adoption of 3G services, is allowing consumers to move fast toward consuming digital content such as videos, gaming, IM, music, etc. With more technologically advanced gadgets coming to the market, the consumption of rich multimedia apps has also increased.
Digital content is data stored or published on electronic devices such as computers, mobile phones, televisions and digital cameras. The smaller towns prefer local languages over English, as is evident from the popular newspapers in any small town are in Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Bengali, etc. Thus, we can exploit this untapped potential of India, if we produce digital content in the local languages. In fact, reports claim that the Indian languages are among the most widely spoken in the world in terms of population. However, the availability of digital content in Hindi is very low - forget any other vernacular language.
In a market like India, music and entertainment apps such Dhingana Music and Bollywood Hungama for BlackBerry are not only popular but are used extensively, given the availability of 3G services and technologically advanced gadgets. Applications like comics-on-the-go, Live TV, etc. have found flavour with its audience and hi-tech smartphones add different dimension to one’s experience. “In addition, increased usage of Internet on smartphones, availability of devices at affordable price points, flexible data plans have further enhanced the scenario for consumption of localized content,” adds Annie Mathew, Head of Alliances and Developer Relations, Research In Motion, India.
Challenges to Localization
If local languages dominate in both print media and the audio-visual media (TV, movies, radio), then, why not on "www"?
The reason is that India is a multilanguage, multi-script country with 22 official languages and 11 written script forms. About 30 per cent of the Indian population speaks Hindi, but it is concentrated only in the northern and central regions. But, interestingly, there are many areas in India where Hindi is not known. So, this leaves content developers confused and makes their task of content development tedious and hefty.
Thus, we see the service providers or the people concerned targeting only a small percentage of the English-speaking people. In other words, we are restricting 800 million people from using the web. Local language interface is not only about convenience, it is also about business needs. Even the government needs to roll out Internet-based citizen services.
The content publishers who have been localizing content by introducing local languages on the web content, still use English in the address bars, logins, and passwords. That might make non-English users feel like unwanted guests to the web. It is important for them to type out the URLs in their own language. One should be able to type out letters using the transliteration option.
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This leads us to the doors of the PC vendors, does the solution to the problem lie with them? Ramprasad Lakshminarayanan, General Manager - Channel Sales, Fujitsu India, explains, "We have a programme being running in India called, 'Think Globally, Act Locally', for the past six months. This is just to show we understand the Indian market needs and are ready to customize our offerings. But in the case of having notebooks and netbooks or PCs or tablets with localized input method (keyboard) is not very feasible considering the diversity in dialects." He also mentioned that, currently, the quantity of localized digital content is very less for vendors like us to market such minutely customized products.
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Ashok Tripathy, Vice President & Head, Wipro Systems & Technology & Infrastructure Availability Services, says, "India is a IT superpower because of technical education in English - which is a preferred international language. The requirement of vernacular keyboards is limited and one of the first developments in this area was done by CDAC. The adoption was however limited. However the IT industry was very quick to adopt the Rupee symbol which was required across Indian sub-continent. Wipro was one the first to develop this. In essence it is the demand and volumes that drives adoption of new technologies and creates and eco-system."
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To this, Sandeep Parasrampuria, Director, iBall, a peripheral manufacturer, shared that after the official launch of new Indian rupee symbol, iBall introduced keyboards with the new symbol. But it is difficult to come up with keyboards with vernacular keys as of now.
One should not forget that the production of digital content runs at high speed placing enormous pressure on global organizations to localize it.
Localization professionals include translators, proofreaders, engineers, software testers and project managers working for software vendors, tool developers and service providers. The total investment required in people, processes and technologies depends on the type of content being localized as well as the volume and number of languages involved.
Ray of Hope!
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As shared by Lenovo, according to a research conducted by wearesocial.net, there are more than 898 million mobile subscribers in India, 292 million of these living in rural areas. It also showed that 346 million Indian mobile users had subscribed to data packages, with more than half of all Internet users in the country accessing the web via their mobile phone. Going with such reports, there is a possibility that mobile phones will become a medium to provide Internet access to many. For players like RIM, it is a good news because their phones support many international and vernacular languages. "At Research In Motion, we are constantly working with our developer base to expand our applications ecosystem and make it strong from a regional and local standpoint as well. We have made significant efforts in developing our developer ecosystem and from a small base of 4,000 developers. We have now built a strong developer base of 26,000 developers in India in just two years," shared Annie Mathew.
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Project Jyoti has been on the forefront to achieve Microsoft's vision of helping India realize its potential since 2004. As a part of this initiative, Microsoft India partners with more than 14 NGOs to support various programmes aimed at empowering underserved individuals, especially Women, through the use of IT. The programme is focussed on empowering unemployed youth, marginalized women and rural communities by imparting IT skills training - or basic computer literacy - and enabling them to explore employment and sustainable livelihood options. Till date, Microsoft has invested Rs.47 crore (US$10.5 million) in this programme, spread across 27 states and Union Territories in India. Across India 1,425 CTLCs are been successfully supported and around 365,160 individuals have been trained in IT skills in partnership with 14 NGOs. "Our Unlimited Potential IT skills training curriculum is available in English, Hindi, Tamil and Gujarati and is designed according to the needs of communities. It helps them in learning the basics of IT that can accelerate their livelihood options," informs Meghashyam Karanam, Product Marketing Manager, Microsoft Corporation.
Not only this, Project Bhasha is a key milestone in Microsoft's effort to stimulate local language computing and take IT to the masses, driven by the fact that 95 per cent of Indians use their local language rather than English in their work and personal life. Being a comprehensive program, it aims to localize (provide local interfaces) to Microsoft’s flagship products, Windows and Office. As of now, Microsoft has localized Windows and Office (provided localized User Interface as well as User Assistance) in 12 Indian languages that include Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Konkani, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu. Microsoft also provides Indian languages support throughout the platform and across the range of products. Microsoft works in close collaboration with state government bodies and nodal IT agencies to create glossaries which are used to create local language interface. Microsoft is working closely with several state governments on localization of e-governance applications.
Finally....
Expectation of affordability is the biggest challenge that hinders penetration of computing devices. Next comes education. Hence penetration is relative to affordability & literacy rate. Localization would definitely help and we have seen that happening in various pockets of the country where state governments have sponsored these compute devices with localized content. With the increasing volume of digital content and the diversity of devices upon which localized content needs to be rendered, it is imperative to compose appropriate localized content. As all will agree, the success of any venture depends on joint efforts. Thus, the entire ecosystem has to be built with significant contribution coming from across the participants.
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Available MS Solutions and tools enabling Localization of Digital Content:
1. Language Interface Packs (LIPs) for Windows XP/Windows Vista/Windows 7 provide a localized User Interface and User Assistance (Help) in the local language. LIPs for Win XP are available in four Indian languages, namely Hindi, Malayalam, Marathi and Tamil, whereas Windows Vista onwards LIPs for 12 Indian languages are available. It provides an end-to-end platform support and includes Keyboards, Fonts, Shaping, Sorting, Collation, etc.
2. LIPs for Office 2010 provide a localized user interface for four most popular applications of Office - MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. It also provides language-specific features like Thesaurus, Spell Checker and Auto correct. These are available in 12 Indian languages shortly.
3. Bilingual and Trilingual Dictionary - Bilingual dictionary (Hindi - English) and Trilingual Dictionary (Hindi - Gujarati - English) is based on smart tag technology and it is designed keeping in mind the peculiar human behaviour so that any Hindi word can be translated into an English or Gujarati word and vice versa.
4. The Indic Language Input tool facilitates users to input localized text easily and quickly. This tool is available in two versions. The desktop version enables the user to input localized text directly into any application running on Windows, such as Microsoft Word or Outlook. The web version allows the user to enter text on any web page - such as Live mail or Windows Live Messenger - without requiring software download. The tool is available for free download and currently supports ten languages - Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu.
5. Data Convertor - Traditionally, the Indian Language Computing industry has been using the fonts creating a huge amount of data. With the advent of Unicode and its wide acceptability across software companies, this legacy environment has started changing. Microsoft also adopted Unicode as a global standard for Indian languages input and enabled its users to create documents on a standard platform of Unicode. This has created a bipolar environment in the organizations with a pool of Unicode Language data and the legacy font-based data. It supports 9 Indian languages (Hindi, Gujarati, Tamil, Marathi, Kannada, Bengali, Malayalam, Telugu and Punjabi).
6. Windows Live, which includes e-mail, Instant Messenger, online storage, photo gallery, Live Writer, Movie Maker, Family Safety, social networking and personalized home page in seven Indian languages, namely Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu.
Syeda Beenish
beenish@varindia.com
