Technology to enable Indian languages: Balendu Sharma Dadhich

New Delhi: Technology can play a significant role in the development of Indian languages. This was the opinion expressed by Shri Balendu Sharma Dadhich, Director (Indian Languages and Accessibility), Microsoft, New Delhi. According to Shri Dadhich technology has both positive and negative aspects and it is our responsibility to make Indian languages more effective through right use of technology. Shri Dadhich was addressing ‘Friday Dialogue’, a program organized by the Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC) on Friday.

Expressing his views on the subject ‘New Media: Emerging opportunities in Indian Languages’, Shri Balendu Sharma Dadhich said that Unicode, a form of technology has enabled 154 languages from across the world to work on your mobile and computer. It is the connecting force of Indian languages. If there was no Unicode today, you would neither be able to read news websites nor send messages to people in your own language. He said that Unicode has played an important role in the preservation of scripts. Today smartphones are coming with the interface of Indian languages. The use of operating systems has increased in many languages. The use of operating systems has increased in many languages. Indian languages are increasingly marking their presence in areas such as e-commerce and e-governance.

According to Shri Dadhich, the new media of today has opened up a multitude of possibilities, but one must be careful not to get so reliant on technology that our ability to think is hindered. Today the reader does not prefer ‘long form information,’. Instead. They prefer to get it in little bits. Writing stories of 6 or 7 words has become increasingly popular in recent years. In a nutshell, Shri Dadhich said that producing creative work is also an art of expression. These arts are growing more prominent in society as a result of the Internet’s influence.

Shri Dadhich said that new innovations in the field of linguistics are providing people hope today. Many languages whose survival appears to be in risk today could be saved if we can make significant use of these technologies. Sound processing and optical character recognition (OCR) have made linguistic content digitization, preservation, and dissemination easier. Machine translation has aided in bridging the linguistic divide.

The program was conducted by Prof. (Dr.) Anil Saumitra, Regional Director, Indian Institute of Mass Communication, Amravati Campus and the welcome address was delivered by Prof. (Dr.) Govind Singh, Dean Academics of the Institute. Vote of thanks was given by Ms. Chhavi Bakaria, Academic Associate in the Department of Outreach.