Mangalore: Search on for Konkani transliteration tool

The Hindu

• Three Wikipedians hope that India Hackathon 2011 will show them the way

 

Mangalore, 09 November 2011: A few Wikipedians interested in developing online content in Konkani are grappling with the technical barriers of dealing with a language that is written in multiple scripts.

 

Gurudath Bantwalkar

 

At least, three Wikipedians are on the lookout for Konkani-speaking software developers who can help them in the task of fine-tuning a transliteration tool for Konkani. They are hoping that India Hackathon 2011, a developers’ meet to solve problems based on Wikimedia technology, to be held in Mumbai held on November 19 and 20 will show the way.

 

Their aim is to refine the Konkani transliteration tool which, once perfected, will enable reading of online Konkani content in Devanagari, Roman, Malayalam, Kannada, and Perso-Arabic scripts.

 

The event aims at improving access, online, offline, and via mobile phone to Wikipedia and other projects of Wikimedia across all Indian languages. The transliteration tool is part of improved language support and is being written first for Konkani. A similar request has been made for Kashmiri, according to Santhosh Thottingal, a Palghat-based engineer, who works for the Wikimedia Foundation.

 

He said the automatic transliteration in Konkani was online and to complete the transliteration system, Konkani-speaking programmers were needed. Hackathon would be a good opportunity for volunteer developers to help with the tool and to discuss issues with developers from the Wikimedia Foundation. If the tool was perfected, it would have a “big impact” as other languages could use it as well.

 

However, Mr Thottingal, who is part of a team working on improving multilingual support for the foundation’s projects and focusing on improving Indian language Wiki projects, said that it had been difficult getting developers interested in Konkani with programming skills and an interest in Wikimedia. Though he could help with the technology, he needed help with the language, Mr. Thottingal said.

 

Gurudath Bantwalkar, Mangalorean Wikipedian and Assistant Director of World Konkani Centre in Mangalore, said though it had been tough, attempts were on to get Konkani-speaking software engineers for the project.

 

Amir Elisha Ahroni, an Israel-based software developer, linguist and participant at the Mumbai hackathon, said that Konkani was “particularly an interesting case” because it was written in many scripts, with no scripts dominant and all useful to a significant number of people.

 

He finds it curious that the scripts include Arabic, which is written from right-to-left, especially as his job at the Wikimedia Foundation is to provide full software support for all scripts that are written from right-to-left, which also includes languages of India such as Kashmiri and Urdu.

 

“Since I can read a little bit of Malayalam, I am curious about the ways that the Malayalam script is used in other languages,” he said.

 

Mr. Ahroni said: “It’s not just Konkani that interests me. Software for supporting all languages of the world interests me...I am curious about all languages, and I believe strongly that all languages are equal and all languages must be supported equally well in all software. English is the most frequently used language in software, but there’s no reason that it should have any exclusive privilege.”

 

He said: “I understood that there are Konkani speakers who want to promote the use of their language. That is something that I always find interesting and I can identify with it, since Hebrew, the language that I speak, also has a history of activists that worked hard to advance it.”