With over 33 major languages and 1652 dialects, India is a nation of diverse cultures and languages. About 95 percent of the nation’s population prefers working in their regional language – while just about five percent conducts its business in English. It is obvious that the disparity in language usage contributes to the digital divide. Since 1998, when Microsoft India identified localization as a key catalyst for effecting ushering in an IT revolution, the company has been working on overcoming the language barrier to computing since.

Today, Microsoft India showcased a host of custom made solutions for the Indian market under its ongoing effort of making technology accessible by localizing its flagship products. The solutions and tools include:

o The Indic Language Input tool is a set of tools that help users enter Indian language text into computers easily and quickly. For example, one can type, For example, one can type “bhaarat mein anek bhaashaein bolee jati hain” for obtaining 2

The Indic Language Input tool is available in two versions; the desktop version enables the user to enter Indian language text directly into any application running on Windows, such as Microsoft Word or Outlook. The web version allows the user to enter text on any web page – such as Live mail or Windows Live Messenger - without requiring software download. The Language Input tool’s visual keyboard enables users to visually select and directly enter Indian language characters. The beta version of the project is available for free download and currently supports ten languages – Hindi, Bengali, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, Gujarati, Marathi, Telugu, Oriya and Punjabi.

o Windows 7 Hindi language interface pack (LiP) which allows users to experience the latest operating system and its features; Windows Taskbar (Go-to spot for launching programs and switching windows), Aero Shake (Click a window pane and shake your mouse to minimize all other open windows), Peek, Snap (Drag an open window to your screen’s border to automatically re-size it. Snap two different windows to the left and right borders for a perfect comparison), Jump Lists, Multitouch (Interact with your PC with a touch-screen monitor, using your fingers and multi-touch gestures, and Remote Media Streaming (Enables highly secure, remote Internet access to home-based digital media libraries from another Windows 7-based PC outside the home) in Hindi.

o MSN Yuva – One stop online Hindi channel for the globally connected youth of India. It offers a window into every aspect that interests Gen X, from sports, to entertainment, to career counseling, to the latest news. It offers features like Dosti – a social networking site in Hindi, Dil Se – An online confession box help that helps finding solutions to one’s most intimate/personal problems with the choice of keeping or revealing one’s identity and Fun Tadka – The fun quotient which provides Bollywood’s latest gossip, film reviews, tips on love & romance etc.

o Internet Explorer 8 in 18 additional languages on Windows Vista/Windows Server 2008 Language Packs which will allow users to access like InPrivate Browsing, Web Slices, Accelerators and Visual Search in Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Konkani, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu.

o Language Interface Packs (LIPs) in 12 Indian languages – Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Hindi, Kannada, Konkani, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Tamil and Telugu - for MS Office and Windows. A total of 45 additional soft (virtual) keyboards, which are free to download, are also available in these 12 languages.

o Windows Live, which includes e-mail, Instant Messenger, online storage, photo gallery, social networking, calendar, online storage, personal home page, and more, in seven Indian languages. The languages are Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu.

o In Microsoft’s most significant initiative to reach out to Indic developers, the Captions Language Interface Pack (or CLIP) has been launched for Hindi, Malayalam, Oriya, and Tamil. CLIP is a tool that uses a tooltip caption to display translations for user interface items in Visual Studio 2008. This is the first tool specifically designed to help students and beginner developers in India use the product in their own language.

o IL-POST (an annotation framework for Indian languages), wikiBABEL (a community-oriented multilingual content creation portal) and MINT (an algorithm for mining multilingual news corpora) developed by Microsoft Research India aimed at creating resources to enable computational linguistics research in Indian languages.

Microsoft has been working on language computing in India since 1998, since the first India visit of Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates. The idea was to usher in the IT revolution in the country in a phased manner – and localization was identified as the key catalyst for effecting this development. In 2003, Microsoft India launched Project Bhasha, a cohesive effort to bring together governments, the academia and research institutions, the local ISVs and developers and the industry associations on a common ground for promoting local language usage in IT. The www.bhashaindia.com portal is India’s leading community for Indian language computing.

Mahindra Satyam, the brand identity of Satyam Computer Services Ltd. (NYSE:SAY), a leading global consulting and IT services provider has signed a new four year offshore contract with KMD, one of Denmark’s leading IT companies. KMD, which specializes in the public sector, signed a renewed contract with Mahindra Satyam for the next four years worth approximately $48 million ending in December 2013. The new contract is an extension of a previous contract that was due to expire this year which involved the supply of application development, testing and application support services particularly in the area of SAP which is a growing business for the Danish IT company.

The new contract involves stronger partnership and multi-fold increase in business commitment with offshore work conducted in a development centre in Bangalore, India. The scope of application development work covered will primarily include SAP, as well as other technologies such as Mainframe applications, .Net, Java, BizTalk, WebLogic, PL/1, Sharepoint and MQ Series.

According to Lars Monrad-Gylling, CEO of KMD, “We have chosen SAP as a strategic technological platform for our development work and consider it a common cornerstone to enable coherence between systems, global market standards and to offer our customers greater openness and freedom of choice. Mahindra Satyam’s outstanding competencies in this area were a major factor in our decision to extend the contract.”

He added, “The offshoring project with Mahindra Satyam allows KMD to achieve even greater growth in the SAP development area and allows us to offer customers a reduced time to market. We consider Mahindra Satyam among the world leaders in their field and the two companies have already been engaged in a highly successful partnership.

C P Gurnani, CEO of Mahindra Satyam commented, “We view this significant contract award as a great endorsement of the quality of work we have already delivered and a real testament to the success of the partnership that has developed between the two companies. We look forward with anticipation to the next phase of this relationship.”

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