Talk Details

The long and winding road: FOSS computing in Indian languages

Name Gora Mohanty

Organisation Sarai, CSDS

Website http://indlinux.org

Scope General

Topic Localisation and Indic Computing

Type talk

Abstract Computing in Indian languages has been the Holy Grail
for far too long. The case for computer interfaces in
local languages should be obvious in polyglot India,
where only about 6% of the populace speaks English.
However, in spite of widespread interest, and efforts
by the government and the FOSS community, we are still
far from the goal.
Perhaps the most successful FOSS localization effort
has come from the community loosely organized under
the IndLinux banner. I will present the current status
of such efforts, the roadblocks in the way, and our
roadmap to fixing these.

Pre-requisites Some knowledge of issues in localization in Indian
languages. I will present a brief introduction to this,
but I want to focus more on the staus of affairs at
present, and where IndLinux, and the community-based
FOSS localization effort is going in the future.

Profile Gora Mohanty is actually a professional
astronomer by training. He graduated
from IIT-Bombay, and then obtained a
Ph.D. in gamma-ray astrophysics from
Iowa State University, Ames, IA, USA.
Since then, he has worked at the Ecole Polytechnique in France, and at the University of California, Riverside. He
is now based at Sarai, CSDS, in Delhi,
and works largely on localization issues for Oriya, and at the national level for IndLinux.