Proliferating the use of Indian Languages through GIST

Shri. Vijay Kumar Malhotra, Director, Official language, Railway Ministry has been closely associated with GIST and is familiar with the versatile range of GIST products. In this article, he focusses on the GIST product range and their utility and applications in Indian languages.
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Scientists of I.I.T. Kanpur in 1983 had developed a common Devanagari Terminal for Indian languages, which was demonstrated in the ‘World Hind Conference’ (Vishva Hindi Sammelan) in Delhi. C-DAC developed the ISCII (i.e. Indian Standard Code for Information Interchange) code on the basis of inherent similarities of scripts. The INSCRIPT Keyboard was developed after looking into the prospect of the spread of English in computers. Thus, Roman script was included along with the Indian script. The coding methodology of ISCII is based on 8 bit, whereas ASCII (American Standard code for Information Interchange) was based on 7 bit which was developed for the Roman script for most of the European languages. Because of the concept of ‘Co-existence’, most of the European languages written in Roman script can be typed in along with the Indian languages because of the INSCRIPT keyboard facility. Due to the existence of similar coding for all Indian languages the facility of mutual transliteration is easily available. Along with this facility the Roman version is also available. That is, transliteration is possible from Indian to Roman script.

It is a historical combination that computers were developed in such countries where the facility of resources are available for Indian languages on their operating systems.

C-DAC has developed a complete series of softwares for Indian languages. The GIST card facility, for data processing along with word processing in Hindi and other Indian languages. The GIST TERMINAL under UNIX environment, the UNIX version of AALP under UNIX environment for word processing, which includes the facility of spell checker. Amongst the most important interfaces developed by C-DAC are LEAP OFFICE and ISM OFFICE. ‘MAC ISM’ for MAC environment, which can be worked out in Hindi for pagemaker and quark express.

It is very clear that ISFOC - the standard font have a significant role in bringing quality improvement in printing in Hindi and other Indian Languages. C-DAC has developed certain important software - such as ISM-publisher and ISM-soft, to facilitate publishing in Hindi and Indian languages.

Recently C-DAC has also released ‘Shaili’ and ‘Pratibimb’ - the Indian clipart.

It is not only possible to exchange messages through e-mail in Devanagri by LEAP-Office 2000 and iLEAP developed by C-DAC, but it is also possible to develop webpages in Hindi. This facility of iLEAP and LEAP OFFICE is available in all Indian languages. C-DAC have provided the facility of ‘MULTIMAIL’ in Hindi and Marathi that is compatible to ‘HOTMAIL’. This is obviously a revolutionary step. It is not only possible to exchange messages in Hindi but also the ‘Commands and ‘Menu’ are given in Hindi. Users can write their password in Hindi.

C-DAC has recently created ‘iplugin’ to develop different web applications into Indian languages and has also accepted the challenge and developed a series of multimedia video. This include a software called ‘LIPS’ which made it possible to make subtitling in Hindi and other Indian languages. It is now possible to watch any foreign movies in an Indian language by using the above software. A Multi Prompter has been developed for news reading in TV, through which the news reader can read the news without looking into the paper and can control the speed of scrolling according to the requirement. MOVE (Multiscript Online video Editor) is a multilingual letter generator through which the naming of the characters in Doordarshan and films from English into Indian languages is possible. A dubbing station called ‘Butterfly’ and a software called ‘ Chameleon’ to make a CD in Indian Languages have been developed. Any video can be converted into CD through this technique.

Today we are at the crossroads of a new millennium. Therefore, it has become necessary that one should draw and underline the forthcoming challenges in Hindi and other Indian languages and find solutions to face these challenges. I strongly believe that if we follow the GIST technology in a wider spectrum, it is possible to fulfil the aims and objectives in an easier way, soas to :

• To assemble classics of Hindi and release it in the form of CD
• Create OCR in Hindi
• To make available websites in Hindi
• To develop a speech input and output system. l To develop a fully computerized machine translation system