Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Schezee Zaidi
Islamabad
National Language Authority (NLA) has released Urdu computer software for computing and processing, developed by its Centre of Excellence for Urdu Informatics, which will ensure that the gap in digital divide is no more a destiny of technology.
The innovative software includes Microsoft application’s Windows and Office with Urdu operating systems. Addressing the gathering at the Urdu software release, Iftikhar Arif, Chairman NLA, said the Authority is also launching a font and a keyboard for Urdu and other Pakistani languages, taking a giant leap ahead in making MT software fill the gap of technological knowledge and bring it within the grasp of Urdu. The new NLA initiative of now places the Urdu Data House fully on cyber space.
Dr Atash Durrani, Project Director Centre of Excellence for Urdu Informatics NLA, gave a detailed briefing on the technical side of this initiative. He said the NLA initiative of introducing the ‘Pak Nastaleeq Font’ is developed to support Urdu and all Pakistani Languages with a single font and keyboard. As the font is Unicode, based on internationalised, unified and standardised class, hence all kinds of data processing and computing become possible with the use of this software, whereas, it was not a feature in Inpage Urdu. With the use of such fonts, Urdu becomes the ‘Language of Internet’. Basic letters, dots and diacritics are also separated on the basis of Ghost Character Theory, now registered with ISO and Unicode.
Another very important feature of the NLA initiative is the new ‘Machine Translation’ software, which would perform the automatic translation from English to Urdu. This achievement is a step towards availing all the information in Urdu. To develop software for a general language translation is near to impossible. The solution thus found is to develop different MTs for different discourses. Initially, the scope of this MT is to translate the official discourse, including budget and finance, to help the government in the advancement of Urdu implementation as per the Constitution. This MT is an endeavour to systematically solve the complex relation of words and meaning of an international language, English, in our national language.
The ‘Urdu Database’ is a dream transformed into reality to make language resources available far and wide with just one click. NLA’s Urdu Database application with testing data is ready to be used for data processing with an aim to develop a comprehensive language reference bank - the ultimate bank of Urdu, which would be used not only by scholars, researchers and teachers but also by students and general users. This is a post dictionary work where one is not forced to share a prior knowledge of work or phrase as a prerequisite of searching its meaning and usage, etc.
NLA’s ‘Urdu Style Guide’ is build to help researchers, authors and publishers to style articles, books and other materials automatically as per the international and customised standards. Applying style manually not only takes extra time but also the care. With the use of the Urdu Style Guide, raw data is formatted with just one click. The first part of this product is the Bibliographer that is being released for writers.
