India Contemplates a Billion Web Users

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Global Watchtower

Common Sense Advisory Blogs

Posted by Benjamin B. Sargent on April 5, 2012 in the following blogs: Business Globalization, Market Data, Translation and Localization, Web Globalization
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As the dream of universal access moved in the past two years from laptops to tablets, the Indian government awarded an ambitious contract to UK-based Datawind Ltd. in the hope of bringing web-enabled tablets to students for under US$50 per child. We wonder what languages these devices will support. With over 700 languages spoken among the target population, what happens when a child is handed an internet-connected computing device?

The U.S. project “One Laptop Per Child” got into trouble by seeking non-profit funding from chip makers and software suppliers, who naturally wanted to dictate outcomes that would advantage them in the long run. The India effort around Datawind’s Aakash tablet has run into manufacturing and procurement hurdles, not to mention insinuations of meddling from government agencies and competing vendors. Language questions are secondary in these situations to greed, not surprisingly. But despite these rough starts, the end goal of ensuring that the world’s children gain access to digital learning experiences will ultimately prevail. At some point in the next decade, a billion internet users in India is not only possible, but likely.

Meanwhile, the race is on to create digital display of Indic scripts for computers in general and the web in particular. Without comprehensive support for extant written languages, inevitably the Aakash tablet and its descendants will push the next generation into thinking and working in a smaller set of languages.

India does not have a national language, although Hindi and English are used administratively by the national government. Each state within the country may specify one or more official languages. Additionally, there are 22 scheduled languages, for which the central government must ensure that "they grow rapidly in richness and become effective means of communicating modern knowledge." All of these languages will likely have a future on the web – many of them a significant future.

Few companies support 22 languages to reach the world (see “Top-Scoring Global Websites: Ranking the World’s 100 Best Global Internet Properties,” Mar11) much less to reach the population of a single country – but our research in examining the top 1,000 websites for several years running shows that the pace of adding languages continues to increase. The Sunday India Times, which not long ago published online only in English and Hindi, now proudly displays 14 languages across the top of its home page. Computer and electronics manufacturers with global markets now routinely publish in 30 or 40 languages.

What should LSPs be doing to support languages in India? First, get to know the languages commonly used online; for example: Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, and Punjabi. Of course there are dozens languages with a million or more speakers in India (see “Can’t Bank, Won’t Buy: A Case Study from India,” Feb12), which agencies should have on offer for customers doing business in that country.

What should enterprise translation managers be doing? First, you need to challenge assumptions in your company about India being an English-speaking country. While the professionals you interact with in India may speak and write well in commercial surroundings, at home they may prefer to surf the web and chat with friends in their own language. But most people in India do not speak English at all -- little more than one in ten, by some estimates. Even Hindi represents only 30% of the population, with another 10% using it comfortably as a second language.

The most important thing is to be informed. Language service providers and translation buyers alike should be on the lookout for the latest language population data, forthcoming soon (we hope) from the 2011 India Census to show how population growth has affected the size of the various language groups since 2001.

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