 Prior to the late 1990s, the IT industry considered it sufficient to deploy English language software within India. Nowadays, however, there is greater pressure on the industry to develop software both enabled for and localized into the scripts and languages in India. (Note that this market does stretch far beyond the borders of India, and as such, any references to the 'Indian market' actually imply Indic-script/language market") |
Factors influencing the current push for development of local language software for India include:
- There are a number of recent initiatives in Indian governmental and educational sectors that require local language support.
- 95% of the population in India is not good in English.
- The market for Indic script software is one of the fastest-growing world-wide with great potential for IT spending.
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It is well known that like many IT companies, Microsoft is now developing software for the Indic-script market. However, many implementers are unaware that both Windows 2000 and Windows XP shipped with support enabled for many Indic languages. What however does 'Indic support" actually mean in these products? There has been a great amount of confusion in the industry around this topic, especially in those markets which use Indic languages.
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| Technical and political challenges inherent to developing software for this market |
There are two major areas of software development that prepare a product for a world-wide market:
- The development process to create technology used to work with language content (text editing, formatting, printing; culturally-correct formatting of dates, times, currency, collation and linguistic casing). This is commonly referred to as internationalization or globalization.
- The development process to translate the user interface into a local language. This is localization.
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These two development processes are distinct, inspite of their combined importance for an international market.
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| Internationalization of a product |
| It is often the case that a product is internationalized for many more cultures than for which the product is localized. One cannot localize a product into a language if the product is not yet internationalized for that particular language, so there is a dependency on internationalization prior to localization. However, the opposite is not true—there is not a technical dependency on localization in order to internationalize a product. |
| Internationalization of a product ideally results in a user being able to seamlessly use his or her native language. Ideally, the user can take this support for granted in a product "enabled" for this particular language, with the work done for the user behind the scenes. |
| With the Windows team now working on the 6th release of a Unicode-based platform, it is often hard to remember what development for a non-Unicode operating system was like. However, the legacy of the Win9x (Windows 95, 98, ME) platform reminds us just how hard it was, since all of Win9x was character-set based. One of the major disadvantages of the development process for Win9x (and there were many) was the inability to provide world-wide software with one set of source code. With only a single Windows code page available per version, there was no way to provide a single product (and source) for anything but a limited market. This slowed down the development and the localization process considerably. |
With regards to Indic-script support, the Windows development team still has much work to do—there are outstanding languages in India that need to be enabled; investigation into Indic-language localization beyond Hindi continues. There is already a great deal of Indic support on Windows today. Users can input and display data, as well as format and sort data, in a number of scripts, independent of localization.
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