“We have still many challenges ahead of us, especially with improving the ease of use in Sinhala for ordinary people.”
Manju Hattotuwa, in ICTA News Update:
I’ve been following with interest, over the past year or so, discussions on how best to promote and expand the use of the vernacular languages in ICT frameworks in Sri Lanka. Arguably, much of the discussion seems to be on the vexing issue of a standards based display and input of characters, particularly for Sinhala. From those who vehemently believe that the present standards are incomplete, to those who suggest otherwise, the sometimes vitriolic debate on how best to mainstream Sinhala in the ICT frameworks designed for Sri Lanka continues with, at least to me, no real headway being made by either side to convince the other of the need to work together instead of hurling abuse at each other. There are moderate and progressive voices that seek to advance the debate, but the ideas and opinions they bring to light are oftentimes subsumed by the other, less helpful comments.
With regards to the problem of language, as repeatedly pointed out in the Lirneasia discussion, a post titled Is Sinhala Unicode Incomplete? offers an insightful look into the complexities of Sinhala font display and input. Is Sinhala Unicode Incomplete? offers links to a plethora of related sites and discussions on the question of Sinhala language display and its adherence (or lack thereof, depending on who you wish to believe) to the UNICODE standard.
Essentially, all I wish to see is a way to enter and display Sinhala in a manner as easy as English on a standard PC or mobile device, irrespective of what Operating System I use. A widely accepted and used standard is fundamentally important in this respect, as it is the foundation upon which Sinhala characters can be entered and displayed across a range of devices, irrespective of which device was used to enter the text.
Such a standards based text input and display is pivotal to the creation of content that is accessible to and can be manipulated by the grassroots in Sri Lanka, who don’t speak English. As I’ve underscored earlier it is this content that is the most vital when thinking about empowerment of grassroots communities and the creation of support structures for peacebuilding in the country.
One such effort is the Voices of Reconciliation programme, which seeks to promote the work done at the grassroots and provincial level by the media, community-based organisations (CBOs), NGOs and civil society as a whole. In the coming months, we hope to have a lot of content in Sinhala and Tamil – entered and displayed using UNICODE fonts available today. For Sinhala input, we use Helwadana Navayugaya, from Microimage, which I’ve written about earlier. This is the best solution we have today and ensures that the content is rendered correctly on the PC’s of all our partners. As Harsha Purasinghe notes:
This debate of Mr. Donald against the entire ICT industry is going on for many years now. What I kindly suggest Mr. Donald whom I have respect for his intellectual work is to bring his ideas to the table in a future revision/review of Unicode and it’s standard. Also most importantly technially develop his version and present to people concerned and general public. The negative side of Mr.Donalds argument is that his method is not technically developed so far and presented or released. As majority of the working groups which included Microsoft to Linux based groupd who agreed on the Unicode it doenst make sense to keep this dragging rather than do technical implementation which is vital for the country.
I wonder whether in addition to the problem of language, it is also a problem of communication?
Those most actively involved in the debates seem to be talking at each other instead of with each other, a classic scenario in conflict escalation. No one really listens and responds taking into account a critical analysis of an opinion contrary to one’s own. Instead, all we hear and read are positions of various people who staunchly refuse to budge an inch from that which they believe to be true.
In this respect, Wasantha Deshapriya’s comments here makes sense to me – all I want as an end-user is to have a font, that I have pre-installed or can download for free, that allows me to input Sinhala (and Tamil) content with the assurance that it can be read by others with a minimum of fuss.
Besides, standards aren’t set in stone – they too evolve. It’s my hope that the Donald’s, Wasantha’s, Nalaka’s, Harsha’s, Manju’s and Samarajiva’s of this world, all inspired and inspiring individuals, work together to develop ways to promote that which we all take for granted in these debates – the ease with which we enter our arguments into websites and blogs in English – is also made available to those who speak Sinhala and Tamil in Sri Lanka.
Filed under: ICTs and other stuff , ICTs and other stuff
It seems that around the area of standards and language I see the most arguments, which is a pity. I have to agree with your last comment, that standards evolve. I have seen too many people criticise Unicode because it lacks features required by the language. Yet they don’t see Unicode as evolving, quite slowly actually. So for instance Khmer had problems, but these have been fixed. Many people spend hours blaming the fact that a non-Cambodian produced the first standard. Although on inspection this non-Cambodian probably was better qualified then them. But in the latest Unicode these are being fixed.
I do wish people spent more energy on developing the standard then blaming others for it being wrong. What they seem to forget is that getting the language into the standard was a feat in itself and makes the job of corrections easier.
The same issues seem to occur around keyboards. Fonts seem only to be affected if they relate to complex scripts.
In my mind most of the conflict revolves around turf wars and most of the most aggresive in the debates are acedemics. They’d like to be know as THE person who got language X into Unicode. Or to be known as the person in charge of X in Unicode. They’d prefer not to share the credit. The same goes for the standard, often the points of departure are small compared to the whole. Yet it allows people to grandstand on those issues so that eventually, they hope, their solution is accepted and they get credit.
Watch out for academics and small for profit companies or people in this area.
On the positive side, once these things are solved they disappear into the background. Things just start to work.
A word of caution from the Ethiopian experience. Do not give up. Stnadardisation is important and must happen for the benefit of ICT and language. You cannot start early as then you debate minor technicalities that have not been seen in real life. But if you leave it too late you end up with 3-4 competing standards: encoding, fonts, keyboards, etc. Where Sinhala sits at the moment may be painful but it is at a good point. I can only encourage those involved to work hard to resolve these issues and think of the consequence of not resolving them as being a major problem.
Some idea of the problems that can happen in the future if there is no agreement:
- You can;t echange documents because encodings are different
- You cannot write software without implementing 3-4 different encodings for the language. Think of the implications for databases and the exchange of database information.
- You have 3 different keyboards all able to enter Sinhala but not compatable. That’s 3 drivers, multiple learning manuals, computers that are not interchangable. No standard laptop, etc
- Fonts need multiple encodings or you need a font per encoding.
Don’t got there. Please!
“Translate.org.za recently completed translating OpenOffice.org 2.0 into South Africa’s eleven official languages – a major achievement that Bailey believes is prompting proprietary firms like Microsoft to look more closely at the needs of non-English speakers.”
Dwayne, thanks for sharing those thoughts. Given your experience and achievements to date, those in Sri Lanka involved in similar endeavours to that of translate.org.za would do well to heed your words.