Information Society Watch

October 22, 2007, Harsimran Singh, Indiatimes Infotech

With initial registration beginning in early 2008, Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs) are opening up to the Indian market. The first domain names, available in Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, Punjabi and Sanskrit, aim to promote diffusion and accessibility of the Internet to rural areas, by facilitating websites' use of local languages in domain names as well as content. However, the opening up of IDNs to India also faces many challenges.

2005, Brij Kothari, Avinash Pandey & Amita R. Chudgar, MIT Press Journal

Same Language Subtitling (SLS) is the idea of subtitling the lyrics of song based television programs (e.g., music videos), in the same language as the audio. Situated in a literature review of subtitling, this article describes the first-ever implementation of SLS on a TV program of film songs, specifically for first-language literacy. Chitrageet, a weekly 30-minute TV program of Gujarati film songs, was telecast across Gujarat state in India, with the lyrics subtitled in Gujarati. The article discusses the results of the pilot study to test the effectiveness of SLS of film songs on the reading skills of out-of-school people.

May 2, 2007, UNESCO

The state government of Kerala through it's state wide ICT project Akshaya with support from UNESCO is going to create community portals in the local language (Malayalam). The portal will comprise vital information such as government schemes,information regarding agriculture, business ventures,products,local job vacancies, educational details,health information, legal rights and so on.

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.

October 2, 2006, Times Of India

Up to six new Indian language portals will be launched in the next few weeks as Yahoo! moves to further enter the Indian market. Additionally, the company will expand its R&D centre in Bangalore to 1000 employees from the current 800.

May 12, 2006, Bill Thompson, BBC

This columnist describes his interactions with Indian programmers who are using the freedom of Linux distribution licences to create instrumental technologies themselves. He believes India is beginning a new phase in its use of free and open source software.