i4donline.net ~ June 2004 Issue - Pan Localisation regional initiative: Developing local language computing

Information has now become such an integral part of our society, that its access is considered as a basic human right. This is because development of rural and urban developing populations is getting increasingly dependent upon access to information. This is specifically applicable to Asia which houses the largest developing population. ICTs, including the Internet, is the largest repository of this information. And, though Asians have become the largest group of Internet users since 2001, these users still form only about 4.5 % of the total Asian population. This shows that there is enormous potential for Internet usage in Asia.

However, in addition to being most populous, Asia is also the most culturally and linguistically diverse region of the world. There are 2197 languages spoken in Asia, which is the largest number of languages spoken in any one region. Only about 20% of these people can communicate in English. This makes English language content available on ICTs inaccessible to a large majority of Asians. This particularly affects those living in the rural areas of developing countries in Asia.

Investments have been put into developing ICT infrastructures in Asia. Nevertheless, the persisting digital divide attests that the current path towards providing connectivity and technology infrastructure alone would not enable the majority of Asian populations to benefit from the present information availability. There are multiple problems perpetuating this divide. One obvious reason is that these populations cannot circumvent the obstacle of English language content. Unless these large non-English speaking populations have the ability to generate and access content in their native languages, they will not be able to use ICTs for their development effectively.

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