BhashaIndia Expert Chat #2

Chat Topic : Commercial Developments in the Language Industry
Chat Expert : Mr. Anto Peter Ramesh

The second edition of the BhashaIndia Experts Chat took place on the 11th of January 2006, between 3 P.M and 5:00 PM. Mr. Anto Peter, a pioneer in the field of Tamil computing fielded a number of queries related to the topic "Commercial Development in the Language Industry" Below is the transcript of the chat:

BIChatModerator (Expert) : Dear BhashaIndia Chat participants, it's my pleasure to welcome you all to the second edition of the Online Microsoft BhashaIndia Expert Chat with Mr. Anto Peter Ramesh

Anto Peter M (Expert) : Good afternoon everybody!

BIChatModerator (Expert) : Some basic rules:

BIChatModerator (Expert) : Please refrain from sending any private messages to the expert during the chat This chat will last for two hours. During this hour, our Experts will respond to as many questions as they can. Please understand that there may be some questions we cannot respond to due to lack of information or because the information is not yet public. We encourage you to submit questions for our Experts. We ask that you stay on topic for the duration of the chat. This helps the Guests and Experts follow the conversation more easily. We invite you to ask off topic questions after this chat is over. Please use the radial button "submit a question" to ask any questions to the expert. The lower right corner, next to the chat input box, is a check box. Please use that for your questions to be logged as a question to the expert. Thanks.

BIChatModerator (Expert) : A brief introduction into the chat topic: Mr. Anto Peter will be answering queries on the subject of Commercial Development in the Language Industry Under this topic, Mr. Anto Peter will be talking about the various issues related to development for commercial purposes in Indian Languages, such as content development in regional languages, for the online Education Industry and the potential of Visual Content in the current market. Please put up your questions relating to these issues and share your experiences with the rest of the participants.

BIChatModerator (Expert) : It's my privilege to introduce Mr. Anto Peter Ramesh, a complete language professional in every sense of the term. Mr. Anto Peter Ramesh has made a name for himself in the Tamil Linguistic community by taking the Tamil language to new heights in the field of computing. He has written 14 books in Tamil about Computing, including the Tamil Nadu State Government Award winning title, "Tamil and the Computer". He also brought the Tamil language to the World Wide Web in 1997 with the launch of the Tamil e-zine, Tamilcinema.com. He also runs another website, tcwords.com, which represents a comprehensive lexicon of computing terms in Tamil. In addition to these achievements, Mr. Anto Peter also heads Softview, a company that works for the advancement of Tamil language in computing and other fields.

BIChatModerator (Expert) : It's our pleasure to welcome him...

BIChatModerator (Expert) : Dear BhashaIndia Chat participants, we request you to start submitting your questions now.

Anto Peter M (Expert) : Q: How big Tamil language market is? A:Overall world wide Tamilian population is around 9cr and technology usage is tremendous. Approximately 30 software developers are making commercial aspects for the Tamil computing. The size of the current Tamil computing is approx. 75-100 cr.

Anto Peter M (Expert) : Q: By "Advancement of Tamil in Computing", what is it that you are working towards? A: Mobile phones and PDAs are upcoming technological devices in the market to touch the rural areas with Indian languages. It may in the form of SMS, MMS, games, calculators, converters etc. This business zone will create big market for ISPs, manufacturers and third party developers. Indian language computing and developmental activities will go on forever. We should concentrate on the upcoming industries. Both software and hardware industry should be in a position to use the Tamil language.

Anto Peter M (Expert) : Q: By "Advancement of Tamil in Computing", what is it that you are working towards? A: Rural market should be attracted by the Tamil computing development. Only then will it get popular and spread in rural. That is one project we are working towards.

Anto Peter M (Expert) : Q: Could you explain how Tamil can be used progressively in the hardware industry? A: Printers, Keyboards, communication devices, touch screen devices etc. are not yet properly used in the local language computing. Comparing to the software development, the hardware industry has not yet picked up that fast. The awareness should be created with the people first. Apart from that, embedded technologies and related activities should also be developed. If we follow these, we can progress in the hardware industry.

Anto Peter M (Expert) : Q: What part can students take up for language development in IT Sector? A: All engineering college students and computer science students have college projects in their final year. Instead of doing similar kind of projects, they can develop projects related to Indian language computing. It may be related to games, applications etc. By doing so, the language development in the IT sector will guide our junior students in the colleges. "Kani Tamizh Sangam" an Association for Tamil computing in Chennai has been training final year engineering projects in Tamil. For the best Tamil computing project, this association has offered prizes also. From this year onwards, the Tamil Nadu state government is also offering awards and prize money for the best local language computing software projects.

BIChatModerator (Expert) : A request to all the BhashaIndia Chat participants, we kindly recommend moderation in the speed and number of queries, so as to allow everyone an opportunity to receive attention.

Anto Peter M (Expert) : There was a question on the issues faced by me. Here is the answer for that

Anto Peter M (Expert) : Issues faced by me earlier: Unable to get the proper fonts Unable to install fonts in computers Issues faced now: After the launch of Microsoft Windows 2000, the scenario became different. Everybody is seeking good office suites. Everybody needs a good spell checker, dictionary, grammar checker and morphological analyzer. Now the web related customers are unable to understand about the Unicode fonts. Wherever we interact with the customers, we are teaching about Unicode. I think this will be easier if people understand the technology changes. So everybody should keep in touch with the language technology.

Anto Peter M (Expert) : Q: is Unicode useful in the language market especially the visual products? A: Definitely Unicode related developments are useful for multilingual visual products development.

Anto Peter M (Expert) : Q: is Unicode useful in the language market especially the visual products? A: Don't think Unicode development is only for application and software development. Large volume of statistical reports and database also need Unicode support. It's useful for development of multilingual dictionaries, video, broadcast related fields also.

Anto Peter M (Expert) : Q: Is there any other stuff we can do for language market without commercial factor A: There are several old and rare books are not yet preserved properly. Books and palm leaves are knowledge providing tools for ever. But most of these materials are not properly taken care of. Everybody should take initiative and interest to digitize the language content. Let it be any language. Old books are assets for our community.

Anto Peter M (Expert) : Q: What kind of products can be developed for Language market? A: Vernacular language fonts and office applications (like MS Office, Browsers, outlook express etc.) are good usage for everybody. These types of products stand in the first stage. Multimedia CD-ROMs market is as equal to VCDs and DVDs market. The vernacular language based animation and tutor CD-ROMs are playing a major role in the market. Animated stories and rhymes mainly target children. Tutor CD-ROMs in general topic or IT related topic also helpful for the students. The CD-ROMs are very popular now and nowadays most of the books carry CD-ROMs.

Anto Peter M (Expert) : Q: What's morphological analyzer? A: A morphological analyzer performs functions critical for analyzing text such as segmentation, lemmatization, noun decompounding, part-of-speech tagging, sentence boundary detection and base noun phrase analysis. Most of the computational linguistics are framing the rules for designing the morphological analyzer. Most of the research institutes are processing this analyzer development. Also like morphological analyzer, we require CORPUS for all Indian Languages.

BIChatModerator (Expert) : Dear BhashaIndia Chat participants, we request you to keep your queries contained to the topic under consideration, in the interest of maintaining the structure of the chat.

Anto Peter M (Expert) : Q: How far the support in the visual media and graphics products for the UNICODE? A: Most of the television companies are not operating with single language production. All Television companies have 3-5 channels in different Asian language. Unicode will play a vital role here to support multiple languages. It may be for News preparation, graphics & cartoon development, content creation, advertisement production etc. If we use Unicode, we can use it commonly worldwide.

Anto Peter M (Moderator) : Q: What's the scope for Tamil technical writing? A: There is more scope for IT Technical writing and Technical translation. In this area, the technical transliteration activities are very less. Technical writing is a rapidly growing market in India. Some of the popular technical writing areas are Operating systems & Applications, Communication Engineering, ISPs, Portal development etc.

Anto Peter M (Expert) : Q: Is there any known or freely available morphological analyzer? A: Morphological Analyzer beta level developmental activity is going at Tamil Department of University of Madras and school of computing department Anna University, Chennai. I hope none of the full fledged software is available for this analyzer.

Anto Peter M (Expert) : Q: How did you inform people or make them aware of the products you have developed? How did you advertise? A: Like everybody, we also do website promotions. In Tamil Nadu, two Tamil computing monthly magazines are published. We make promotions in those magazines also. We also concentrate on computer and book exhibitions to promote our products. All Tamil newspapers have weekly supplements for IT and we do promote there.

Anto Peter M (Expert) : Q: It's great that Unicode would be useful for more TV channels catering local language. Are they using it now? Is there any difficulty in using it for TV channels using Unicode A: Yes. It is working fine in the Unicode compatible applications. Unicode interfaced and certified products are used by major TV networks. Whenever they upgrade their broadcast technology, corporate TV channels are seeking Unicode support now.

Anto Peter M (Expert) : Q: Sir, Have you received any feedback from people who have used your software? A: Yes. I am having around 11 thousand satisfied customers world wide. Because of their valuable feedback and satisfaction only, I am able to grow in the market. For the past 15yrs, Tamil computing is my financial partner.

Anto Peter M (Expert) : Q: Does OCR come under Morphological analyzer. How good the market is for Tamil OCR or other OCR products? A: Tamil OCR and ICR are making tremendous work in the language computing industry. But it's not available with morphological analyzer now. It supports only dictionaries.

BIChatModerator (Expert) : A request to all the BhashaIndia Chat participants, we would recommend moderation in the speed and number of queries, so as to allow everyone an opportunity to receive attention.

BIChatModerator (Expert) : Dear participants it would be simpler for Mr. Anto Peter to answer your questions if we could have the questions a little more slowly.

Anto Peter M (Expert) : Q: How much of a rural reach is at present now in TN in terms of computing, Mr. Anto? I was just curious as you were earlier talking about rural mobile reach is one aspect you were looking at, and would like an estimate on the spread of computers in rural TN. A: Approx 2% only (my guess) for rural reach in computing. Believe or not, on New Year day January 1, 2006, eight crores SMS were shared in Tamil Nadu itself. But the language used was English because of lack of Indian language support on the mobile space.

Anto Peter M (Expert) : Q: In the article about you on BhashaIndia.com, it has been mentioned that one of your primary interests right now is providing content in regional languages for educational purposes. What areas does the content cover? A: I mainly concentrate on Tamil computing and it covers areas like Web development, desktop publishing, graphics and animation related to Tamil language. I have written 15 Tamil books on IT. A new book of mine will be released tomorrow at the Chennai Book Fair.

Anto Peter M (Expert) : Q: Sir, you've mentioned that you have over 11 thousand satisfied customers worldwide. Would this mean that there is a market for Indic language computing products abroad as well? If so, then in what fields? A: Yes. There is a world wide market for Indic language computing. The popular fields are printers, publishers (Newspapers, magazines etc.), television studios, portal development, statistical centers, educational institutions etc.

Anto Peter M (Expert) : Q: Is DTP really a good market with profits? A: If we do the DTP in a professional way, it's a profitable business.

Anto Peter M (Expert) : Q: Wouldn't an SMS service in an Indian language require some sort of support from the service providers side? And would the number of mobile users who use Indian Languages be large enough to make it feasible from the providers' point of view? A: Yes. We require support from mobile service providers. Singapore based mobile providers are providing Chinese and Tamil SMS facility. To use it properly, the users should have the knowledge of operating their keypad in local language. Also the mobile handset manufacturer also should support this through proper user manuals.

Anto Peter M (Expert) : Q: How can IT books be taken to the rural areas? A: I have written around 15 books for IT and approx. 500 books are available in Tamil for IT. To the rural computing, we require technical information in vernacular languages. Comparing to leading Indian languages, Tamil is having more books on Information Technology. Most of the vernacular language books are written by professors and educationalist. Programmers and engineers should also come forward to write IT related books. This will help students to expand their knowledge in deep technical substance.

Anto Peter M (Expert) : Q: Is a web based local computing product or portal profitable? A: Yes. Very much if promoted properly.

Anto Peter M (Expert) : Q: What are the applications can be developed for language computing purpose? A: Don't think of Operating Systems, communication and front-end software design alone should be in vernacular languages. Lots of Vernacular language tools are required in the market like dictionaries, word processors, speech synthesizers, spell checkers, morphological analyzers, corpus, terminology based dictionaries etc. These tools can be used in both offline and online applications.

Anto Peter M (Expert) : Q: Are there any good magazines in local languages promoting local computing and computing in general? A: There are so many books in many Indian Language available in the market. But they concentrate more on technology front and not on language computing.

BIChatModerator (Expert) : Please use the radial button "submit a question " to ask any questions to the expert. The lower right corner, next to the chat input box, is a check box. Please use that for your questions to be logged as a question to the expert.

Anto Peter M (Expert) : Q: Also tell us as to how your projects enable accounting and administrative purposes? A: Office 2003 plays a major role worldwide in office administration and communication areas. Apart from this, we require more accounting and database related activities in vernacular languages. I think Unicode encoding will play a major role in the above mentioned areas. Corporate should also move into language based billings and accounts. Though it is happening now but its making very slow progress.

Anto Peter M (Expert) : Q: Sir, what do you think is the best way to promote Indic computing in the rural areas? A: By making awareness programs about the technology in a simple way in their own language. We should also offer proper demos of the products. And we should also make awareness to read technology updates through books and newspapers.

BIChatModerator (Expert) : To answer your question...As a much larger number of Indian consumers gain access to computers the necessity to have Indian language applications and platforms is exploding. Along with that the importance of being able to handle multiple languages easily within documents, databases, and web based content is growing exponentially. If you combine that with the fact that Indian developers are continuing to grow in their production of software for many companies and industries all over the world, spreading the Unicode message is gaining in importance. The global economy and the ease of world wide communications and data exchange via the Internet is creating a new market for developers both inside and outside India to tap into new customer markets world wide and reach millions of new users who would have otherwise been left out of the computer world, but supporting many new languages is the key, as most of these new users will not have a good understanding, if any at all, of English.

BIChatModerator (Expert) : In 10 years time, I would expect the percentage of web content in various languages to be a much closer match to the actual percentage of language speakers around the world. Unicode is a fundamental enabler of such a multilingual and inter-connected world.

BIChatModerator (Expert) : 10 years later everything will be available online. No individuals will develop language products. Corporate and research institutions will take care of the activities. The trend will be to move with quality products.

BIChatModerator (Expert) : Dear BhashaIndia Chat participants, we are heading towards the end of this session. Thank you all for the keen participation and all the queries. Mr. Anto Peter thanks you all for your participation and interest in this language community chat. Look forward to our next chat.

BIChatModerator (Expert) : More queries can be mailed to experts@bhashaindia.com We look forward to your interaction.

BIChatModerator (Expert) : Eid Mubarak and have a great evening!

BIChatModerator (Expert) : Looking forward to meeting you all in the next edition of BhashaIndia Chat. Good Bye...