Do Tamilians care about Technology that’s offered to them in Tamil
On the question of what needs to be done to help Indic languages only speakers to improve their lives and livelihood through mobile (and technology at large) – the views tend to run all over the spectrum.
Tech majors (like Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft & Facebook) feel they have done enough and to do anything beyond there is no “ask” from the users’ side – who are happy to keep using English (even though their English knowledge is basic) as it is an Aspiration & Social Status language in Tamil Nadu & India. Even whatever these companies (and open source efforts like Open Office) have developed for Tamil remains largely unused.
People like me, feel companies and government have to do more and keep at it – over a period (sooner) offer the same level of possibility and features that are there in English for local languages as well. This will improve the users’ productivity and hence their lives profoundly. And this starts with the basics of the user-interface being in local languages – in a car, the controls like AC Cool/Hot button being in Tamil as குளிர் / வெப்பம். The idea is doing something in your mother tongue that you know well compared to your basic English skills which can lead to errors and lower productivity.
When I was speaking on this to Aazhi Senthil Nathan an expert on the field of translation, he gave me a different perspective. In India especially Tamil Nadu, our populace has largely become bilingual and they can read (or learn to read quickly) English scripts (they won’t understand the meaning) – and there is no point in imagining them to be monolingual. Just by offering UI in say Tamil you will not have many takers. In his view the problem is not the User Interface – changing File to கோப்பு, may mean a check-box for a product manager in their localisation tasks, but users in Tamil Nadu care little for it – as they can figure it out in English (we Tamilians are smart) on few tries.
The real problem is how you train them and educate them. As an example, a first step, in say on the usage of MS Word or Adobe Photoshop will be to prepare the training materials, courseware, videos, manuals in Tamil (and other local languages). Local language should be more than skin deep – the user interfaces don’t matter much – but the language through which you communicate with them, impart knowledge and make them productive has to be Tamil.
This insight is leading me to see the importance of all-around improvement of Tamil medium school education – a topic I had written about a few weeks ago.
If you want to understand a bit of background here, you can read my earlier post on Google for Tamil in which I wrote: “In the early decade(s) the pace of development (for Tamil) was painstakingly slow and limited to fonts and keyboards, then it just took off – coinciding with the meteoric rise of Mobile phone users in India. In the early years, the Tamil technology pioneers had to work very hard to see their language show up on the computer screen when none of the platform software vendors cared for any of the non-latin languages. Even within Tamilians, we had bitter ways over the technology standards to power Tamil which got resolved with Tamil Nadu Government’s G.O. in 2010 – looking back I am happy that I had a tiny little part in that. I remember the days when I was the Vice-Chairman and then Chairman of INFITT, a non-profit registered in California, it was tough to get the attention of American companies to implement even the basic features for Tamil – then gathering the data to convince them this market is worth their attention was next to impossible.
Today, all the five technology giants have extensive support for Tamil – Apple (iOS, Mac OS), Microsoft (Windows, Bing, Bhasha India and more), Google (Android, Google Search and more), Facebook (Tamil LUI), and, Amazon (Kindle). The journey for Tamil & other Indian languages to reach the place where the English language is in Computers today, in my opinion, is another decade away but it is sure to happen as the consumer market in India is the only one outside China that is still open for business.”
4 Comments
Naraya na Swamy Raja
Thank you pioneers. You made it. During 2012 and 2013 I was struggling to get my texts typed in Tamil. Today it is so easy and as simple as English. I wondered how will you accommodate 247 Tamil letters in a keyboard of 26 letters. To make your task simple, I painstakingly worked to reduce them within 25. I could accomplish it by making Vowels 7 + a long vowel sign( nedil kuri) . consonants 18 + upper dot (Mel pulli). Surprisingly you made it without those ideas.
It’s pleasant using Tamil fonts with so many other facilities like auto correction, word prompting and the like. Now voice to text is also a reality. Thanks a lot.
All these are realised only through selfless dedication and spirit of darling sons of mother Tamil.
venkatarangan
I agree. I am sure complements like the one from you, would make the pioneers including my good friend Mr Muthu Nedumaran of Malaysia and countless others pleased.
Solomon Nadar
While the idea of having MS Word in Tamil sounds nice, I doubt it makes a lot of difference. Rather the main need is tools for content creation. No government in India seems to care about the need of bilingual keyboards on laptops. While 1 or 2 companies are selling physical bilingual keyboards, no such option is available for laptops. Considering that almost everyone buys a laptop now a days instead of desktops, the physical keyboards are just hardly used by anyone. Maybe a rule can be made that all laptops should have bilingual keyboards?
My observation is from seeing how my parents struggled to with using WhatsApp and observing the same thing with other relatives. These were people who could read English but get only a gist of it. So they just ended up spamming WhatsApp groups with those Tamil forwards. When I told my parents that this was annoying, he asked me to send his messages in English. And when I told them, I won’t be around all the time, my Dad wanted to learn to type in Tamil. Now that he can type it, there is no spamming either. However, he now grew confident and asked me if he could use a computer. Sadly, the desktop is not something he can carry while travelling in Mumbai trains to practice and his content creation is stuck at creating WhatsApp messages.
As a blogger I am sure you don’t write content using tablets or phones. If we need to create more Tamil content on the internet, we need to push for English+Tamil keyboards on laptops. The layout can beTamil 99 or a simple Google layout since Tamil Inscript seems confusing.
venkatarangan
@Solomon, thanks for sharing your views. i agree it is extremely important to make typing tamil as easy as english. that’s why for many years i have worked in my tinyest ways to get major OEMs to include Tamil keyboard. today, Android, iOS, Mac OS & Linux out of box support Tamil typing almost always; i am happy to say that the upcoming “April Update” to Windows 10 will have out of box Tamil 99 keyboard layout.