Ms Lata and Mr Kulkarni are two of the outstanding Indian scientists and leaders who have driven the internationalisation and localisation efforts for India’s more than one billion people, speaking 22 official languages. They are considering the establishment of LRCs at federal level and in each of the Indian states. Ms Lata and Mr Kulkarni are visiting the LRC this week to explore possible collaborative efforts between India and UL. Today, they shared their vision of the digital future of India with UL-based scientists and students, a future where Indian citizens will be able to access digital information in their language and according to their cultural preferences.

The Technology Development for Indian Languages (TDIL) Programme at the Department of IT has been continuously engaged in promoting long term research in the area of language technology. As a result of these efforts, basic information processing kits have been made available in most of the 22 official Indian languages. Now the need is being felt to couple the research outcomes with practical deployments especially the e-governance which is right now under implementation in the country. To proliferate the localisation activity in the country, there is a need to take certain pro-active measures so that the challenging task of localisation in 22 officially recognised Indian Languages can be undertaken. 

Reinhard Schäler, Director LRC, said “the establishment of standards, the development of need-based localisation tools, the adaptation of existing tools for Indian Languages, and the development of linguistic resources, testing, and certification mechanisms are all areas where the LRC has extensive knowledge and expertise. We see an urgent need to open up the narrow focus on mainstream localisation which today does not serve adequately the majority of the world’s population. We believe that an initiative by the Indian Government’s in this direction would have the potential not only to change the way India’s more than one billion citizens are going to access digital content, it has also the potential to profoundly change the world’s digital content industry and global localisation efforts. We are determined to continue and develop our long-standing relationship with the TDIL programme and are very keen to support the efforts our Indian colleagues are proposing.”

TDIL and LRC are discussing the possibility of joint research projects, staff and student exchanges and joint funding applications. Both organisations have been interacting on these issues for many years and are now considering the possibility of a long-term collaborative effort and interaction.

About the Technology Development for Indian Languages (TDIL) Programme

India is a large multi-lingual society with as many as 22 constitutionally recognised languages, English as an associate language and Hindi as the national language. Therefore in order to communicate with people of different regions, one has to know more than one language. The recent advances in Information Technology (IT) aims at narrowing down these communication barriers. The Technology Development for Indian Languages (TDIL) programme was launched by Ministry of Information Technology, Govt. of India in the year 1991-92. The programme aims at promotion of IT tools for Indian Languages. TDIL is a research programme of the Department of Information Technology.