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Deutsche Welle
the German broadcasting service has online services
in Bengali and Hindi, a first among the leading
international broadcasting organizations. An Urdu
service is also slated to begin soon.
Deutsche
Welle (DW), a German international broadcasting
service offers a global package of programmes
for radio, television and the Internet in different
languages including German, English and Spanish.
DW's highly regarded training centre: DWFZ, provides
comprehensive training to broadcasters from the
developing world as well as eastern and south-eastern
Europe. It offers courses in journalism, technology
and administration, in Cologne (radio) and in
Berlin (television).
Recently, the
Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC)
assisted DW-WORLD.DE - the multilingual and multimedia-based
internet address of Deutsche Welle to expand its
Bengali, Hindi and Urdu Service. C-DAC's GIST
facilitated the expansion of DW-WORLD.DE by developing
special Open-type fonts suitable for the complex
nature of the DW-Online framework. The settings
of the Content Management Service (CMS) based
platform, to streamline the framework of the multilingual
online service, established a requirement for
characters of all the scripts to be in the Unicode
standard. Latin based scripts like German, English,
Turkish or Bahasa Indonesia could be easily integrated
into the system. Scripts like Amharic, Dari, Pashtu,
Bengali, Urdu and so on. were not fully developed
as usable Unicode-based characters or Open type
fonts. C-DAC's GIST took up the challenge for
Bengali, Hindi and Urdu scripts and developed
a tailor-made solution to meet the specific requirements
of DW-Online. The process involved extensive interaction
between C-DAC GIST and DW to address finer details
and the process is ongoing to incorporate further
improvements in the future. The Bengali and Hindi
Services of DW-Radio have also been using C-DAC
GIST products like iLEAP & LEAP
Office 2000 with satisfaction.
"When the
requirement for a Bengali Open-type font came
up, C-DAC's GIST was the natural partner. During
my visit to C-DAC last year I was quite pleasantly
surprised to meet a young, competent and vibrant
team of employees full of innovative ideas. It
was certainly not something one would expect in
a state controlled organization. During my long
and detailed interaction with C-DAC regarding
the development of the Bengali Open-type font
I was even more impressed by the flexibility,
innovation and speed of work in C-DAC. There were
solutions practically for all problems",
comments Sanjiv Burman, Editor, Bengali-Service,
Deutsche Welle.
The new Bengali
online service is the first of its kind offered
by any leading international broadcasting organization.
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