By Medha Basu
In a crucial step towards making online public services more inclusive, Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) of India has launched a set of tools to develop online content in local languages for the various e-government portals and services.
The localisation portal offers basic tools and services for making e-government applications available in the official language of each state apart from English. Tools are currently available to support 6 Indian languages, and will gradually be made available for the other 16 official languages in India.
Each project under India’s National e-Governance Plan has several online applications and portals, and the localisation portal provides standards, best practices and guidelines to support the agencies undertaking localisation of their applications.
Joint Secretary for e-government at DeitY, Rajendra Kumar, shared that the localisation tools have already been used for seven projects, including content for health, e-district, public distribution system, pension, education and agriculture.
The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing is helping ministries and departments in the localisation process and has designed the Localisation Projects Management Framework (LPMF). It will assist with “surface localisation” of the user interface and static information on websites and “internal localisation” of online applications including linked databases.
The localisation portal offers code converter APIs for converting legacy data to Unicode, JavaScript based on-screen keyboards, Sakal Bharati OpenType font (which supports all 22 Indian languages) and transliteration services. The portal also displays a dashboard illustrating progress of localisation across the various e-governance projects based on the LPMF.
Source: http://www.futuregov.asia/articles/2014/feb/25/india-launches-e-government-localisation-tools/