Tamil solutions
LOCAL LANGUAGE computing in the country is still in its infant state and that can only mean opportunities for students.
According to Kani Tamizh Sangam, a non-profit society comprising academicians and Tamil software professionals, computer science students must look at ways for exploiting the opportunities the coming years will throw up for local language software developers.
The Department of Information Technology has recently launched Technology Development for Indian Language (TDIL) to promote the development of information processing tools and techniques to facilitate human-machine interaction without language barrier; creating and accessing multilingual knowledge resources; and integrating them to develop innovative user products and services.
To encourage students take up Tamil computing, Kani Tamizh Sangam had launched last year
the `kaniyam' project (Tamil for computing). The idea was to encourage computer science students to come up with Tamil language software solutions. Students of 18 colleges were selected and given a year to develop the solutions, with the promise of cash awards for the best projects. The members of the sangam were pleasantly surprised at some of the projects that were featured at a presentation held at Anna University a couple of weeks ago.
The students had come up with some original ideas and did not depend entirely on the vast resources of open source software available in the Internet. Meaning, they did not do just a transliteration job but came up with innovative ideas from the scratch.
Manoj R. Annadurai, a Tamil software developer and president of the sangam, said students who worked on Tamil software projects also stood a fair chance of finding placement in the many software firms that are growing to cash in on the trend.
"It is surely a key area in the coming years and added to that is the satisfaction that you are contributing something to the society."
Karthik Subramanian
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