In its concerted efforts to tackle the language barrier to IT adoption in the country, Microsoft India on Tuesday showcased a host of custom-made solutions for the Indian market.
Some of the solutions include Language Interface Packs (LIPs) in 12 Indian languages for MS Office and Windows, Windows Live in seven languages and Captions Language Interface Pack (CLIP) which uses a tool-tip caption to display translations for user interface items in Visual Studio 2008.
Aimed at creating resources to enable computational linguistics research in Indian languages, the research projects showcased were IL-POST (an annotation framework for Indian languages), wikiBABEL (a community-oriented multilingual content creation portal) and MINT (an algorithm for mining multilingual news corpora).
Commenting on the need for language computing to enable mass IT usage in India, Ravi Venkatesan, chairman, Microsoft India, said, ?the language barrier is an added challenge towards providing access to information to a huge number of Indians and thereby having them participate in India?s growth curve. Microsoft, under its global Unlimited Potential effort, aims to deliver computing through accessible, relevant and affordable solutions. Localization issues are a huge factor where accessibility is concerned, and as a global industry leader, we believe Microsoft has a responsibility and the resources to make some difference.?
A highlight of the showcase was a glance at the beta version of Windows 7 in Hindi, one of the eight global languages the operating system (Beta) was released recently.