Information Society Watch

October 20, 2006, Amy Yee, Financial Times

Yahoo! is joining the growing trend of localisation, i.e. programmes developed for regional languages, with the launch of its local language chat in India. The new program allows users to chat in Hindi and Tamil without any need for a language keyboard by typing phonetically on the English keyboard, which will automatically be converted to the vernacular scripts. There will also be plugin features soon available in languages like Telugu, Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati and Malayalam. Indian language Audibles are also being introduced in Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Malayalam, Gujarati and Punjabi. Yahoo! is attempting to better compete with domestic rivals like online portal Rediff, which recently launched a Hindi chat service, and establish itself in a market that is projected to have 500 million users by 2010.

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