The presentation on the Global Initiative for Local Computing at the IUC28 came in a conference track dedicated to emerging markets. Schäler said that the typical software company would would disqualify localizing its products for developing and undeveloped markets due to the lack of projected return on investment.

What are the implications of not having modern software products available for less frequently spoken languages in developing markets? Schäler quoted David Brooks who contended that “languages not present in the digital world will soon become obsolete,” then drew a continuum that spelled out no market means no internationalization, no localization, no digital presence, and thus no survival. He asserted that current localization efforts focus on western languages and cultures, thus supporting their world view and leading to a situation where “dominant locales create a blanket, suffocating the rest.”

What will it take to bring at least the character support to these less economically viable languages and the countries where they’re spoken? Schäler asserted that it would take 700 years at the present development rate to encode the world’s remaining scripts in Unicode, but only a few million dollars to bring the Unicode foundation of an information society to these countries.

Some support is available in the form of European Union and Canadian government programs, United Nations efforts, and work by companies like Hewlett Packard with its eInclusion program. The GILC program will supplement government, industry, and open-source projects by clarifying intellectual property rights, promoting local deveopment work, developing infrastructure, faciltating learning, and creating a repository of localized software. The GILC project intends to rally support for preserving languages in the digitized information age. Without active work, these languages will disappear along with the cultures and world views they represent.