Efforts in India and Africa to make Windows available in more languages will promote technology adoption and help improve Microsoft’s relations with local governments. The company plans to add localized versions of Windows in six African languages and in 14 of the 18 official languages of India.

What Localization Means

Although Microsoft provides support for many languages in specific applications, particularly Word and PowerPoint, this support is often limited to user data and dictionaries—a level of support that Microsoft calls language "enablement," according to Raveesh Gupta, program manager for localization at Microsoft’s India subsidiary. Full "localization," in contrast, offers menus, dialog boxes, error messages, and other interface elements in a local language, which permits much broader computer use for a linguistic community. Localization affects all applications that use standard Windows interfaces, as well as Windows itself, not just specific applications.

Localization efforts typically involve much more than simple translation: academics, governments, software developers, and linguists are generally involved in ensuring that a language is used properly, that standard terms are applied throughout the interface, and that the solution can be implemented in Microsoft and third-party software.

Localization Benefits

Localization is critical to wider adoption of technology in less-developed countries and is a factor in low computer ownership and use. More people in the world speak Hindi as their first language (333 million) than English (322 million), and more speak Bengali (250 million) than speak French, German, or Japanese (approximately 130 million each); yet Windows does not currently have Hindi or Bengali interfaces. While economic factors play the most significant role in computer ownership and use, the prospects for computer adoption are low among people who must first learn another language before they can use a computer.

In addition, local governments, which in many economies are the only players with the resources to adopt computers in significant numbers, are often hampered in "e-government" efforts by language barriers when hiring staff or encouraging public access to computer resources.

Political considerations also play a role: technology organizations that support local languages get a better reception from local governments and from citizens generally. In this respect, Microsoft trails Linux and OpenOffice.Org, which are currently available in five Indian languages.

Localization Efforts

In India, Microsoft has launched Project Bhasha (from the Sanskrit word for "language"), an ambitious effort to involve governments, developers, universities, and others in localizing Windows for 14 Indian languages: Assamese, Bengali, Gujarat, Gurumukhi, Hindi, Kannada, Konkani, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu.

To assist in the effort, Microsoft has created a Language Interface Pack that can reduce the time required for localization from a typical three years to only six months. The company will also set up five "centers of excellence" for localization, sponsor workshops for developers, sponsor the porting of some third-party applications, and provide training for localization and Unicode (which maps all of the world’s written characters, using 16- or 32-bit entities, compared with the common 7-bit ASCII encoding, which is limited to 128 characters). A Web portal will foster communication among those involved in localization.

A similar localization effort in Africa, involving governments, universities, and developers, will localize Windows and Office in six languages: Afrikaans, Sepedi, Setswana, Swahili, Xhosa, and Zulu.

More information about Project Bhasha is available at bhashaindia.com.

For more information about global development issues, see www.microsoft.com/globaldev/getwr/steps/wrguide.mspx.