The company is also seeing growing demand from Indian government agencies and companies creating online public services in local languages. “As many of these companies want to push their services into rural India or tier-two towns or smaller towns, then it becomes essential they communicate with their customers in the local language,” said Pradeep Parappil, a Microsoft programme manager. The project’s website, BhashaIndia.com, offers user-edited glossaries in local languages for technology terms and words with slang meanings in social networking, such as “nudge” and “wink”.
Last December, Yahoo and Jagran Group, a large Hindi newspaper publisher, started Jagran.com, a portal in the Hindi language, the native tongue of 420 million Indians.
Yahoo, which also offers e-mail and other content in several Indian languages, says that Jagran.com has surpassed its expectations for user traffic. “Localization is the key to success in countries such as India,” said Gopal Krishna, who oversees consumer services at Yahoo India.
Google recently introduced news aggregation sites in Hindi and three major south Indian languages, and a transliteration tool for writing in five Indian languages. Its search engine operates in nine Indian languages, and can translate search results from the English Web into Hindi and back.
Google engineers are also plugging away on voice recognition, translation, transliteration and digital text reading that it plans to apply to other developing countries.
Hanumanthappa of Quillpad said he was inspired when friends at Google told him they had compared Quillpad with Google's transliteration tool. He believed the use of local languages on the Web would soar even as more Indians strived to learn English: “People want to look forward, and they want to learn English. That is all right, but English is not enough for all their needs.”
©2008/THE NEW YORK TIMES