Echoing the mission of the Global Initiative for Local Computing (GILC), linguist Dr. Reddy underscored the importance of bringing global knowledge to rural India. While he called for “better translation tools” to aid in this effort, we think that he really meant they need “cheaper, more usable” tools.

Tools such as translation memory from Atril, SDL, and Wordfast already provide the features most desired by translators. What they’re missing are the right price point — we see the sweet spot as US$99 in the North Atlantic, even less in developing markets — and a simpler, easier-to-use interface. Those characteristics would put the product in the hands of more translators — and also be in the right pricing neighborhood for the sub-$100 computers being targeted for rural populations in developing countries. Software priced 6 or 7 times the cost of the computer won’t be widely used.

Besides market-priced, accessible software, what else would help educate the rural populations of developing countries? We see two things: 1) more work in the open source area to bring essential information age software like OpenOffice to these regions and 2) a global knowledge network that would connect projects at the many institutions of higher learning such as the Meenakshi College of Women with resources at the University of Limerick, Kent State, Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (GeNESS), and other academic programs dealing with translation issues.