The English language is aspirational in India. However, a growing number of internet users in India choose to use the Internet in their language. Although English is prominent on major online platforms, only 12 percent of the population of India is proficient in English.
According to a report from Google, the country had 234 million web users but just 175 million English users, which means the difference between these two groups is likely to increase in the coming years. In addition, the report states that nine out of ten new internet users between 2016 and 2021 will use local languages. And because of that, we have seen the advent of numerous LPSs, such as Tamil translation services in India.
The last few years have witnessed an increase in the adoption of the Internet across the country, riding on low-cost smartphones and lower cell phone data services. However, the Indian population faces a significant digital language gap.
The English Startup
When computers became mainstream in the late 1990s and the early 2000s, Windows could not offer one of the most popular Indian languages as a default system language. As a result, the majority of Indian people who spoke the language, particularly those who didn’t learn the English language in school, had trouble with computers at their universities and work but had no option to escape. In this scenario, the importance of Professional Hindi Translation Services also became apparent.
The idea of putting a computer at every desk could not have been achieved, causing much harm to the populace. So instead, Microsoft started with Indic computing through its Project Bhasha initiative and made incremental steps throughout the years. Today, Windows 10 has supported over 12 Indian languages from the start. Meanwhile, agencies such as Professional Tamil Translation Services are playing an integral role in this scenario.
This was also evident in the mobile-based ecosystem. In the beginning, a lack of support for languages and content was the main obstacle to adopting the Internet for a large portion of Indian mobile-first users who speak a language. Many struggled to use the English keyboard choices.
But the times are changing.
The Indian Language Ecosystem
By 2023, there will be over 500 million users of Indian languages, while English users will be less than half the number.
Transliteration And Translation
Indus OS Labs (OS Labs), a startup based in India, quickly recognized this opportunity. Indus OS, based on Android, is a multilingual operating system that can support the 12 different regions of Indian dialects. The OS provides a regional interface and includes integrated features such as transliteration, translation, and even text-to-speech.
Several domestic players, such as Micromax and Karbonn, offer a range of low-cost smartphones running Indus OS. LSPs, such as Professional Marathi Translation Services are also playing an important role in allowing a smooth translation process.
Localizing Mobile Applications
As a mobile-first nation, it is evident that app developers can only be successful by making localization a priority for English applications in the English language. India was home to more than 300 million smartphone users in the year 2017; therefore, local support for mobile devices could determine the success or size of a product.
Language Support By Google And Indian Startups
Facebook is among the most downloaded apps in India and supports 13 languages spoken in the country. Google is also increasing its apps and services, among them the most popular apps available for Android phones that support local Indian languages. A couple of years back, Microsoft acquired Swiftkey, the iOS and Android keyboard application that provides pre-programmed text in 24 Indian languages.
Indian startups are also on the offensive to reach this previously niche market which has become mainstream. Some apps can be localized and services built from scratch rather than making language support an extra step. In this case, agencies such as Marathi Translation Services play an important role.
ShareChat is a well-known app that lets you communicate various types of content, including memes and cooking recipes – in 27 languages and ten dialects. It has over 3.5 million active users per day. DailyHunt is the top news aggregator, with over 150 million apps installed and content available in 14 languages.
One of the unresolved challenges is the e-commerce ecosystem and the payments interface, which still need to be Indian-language-friendly, preventing the masses from transacting online.
Language Computing
Instead of localizing items and products, Microsoft is working on advances in language computing that leverage cloud computing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. This will improve its range of products and services while propelling the industry in the right direction.
In 2016, after an almost 20-year effort, Microsoft significantly advanced speech recognition. It created a system that can recognize spoken words like a human can. The human-likeness of speech recognition could substantially impact both business and consumer products and digital assistants such as Cortana. The use of speech recognition could dramatically improve. In this process, aid from LSPs such as Hindi Translation Services cannot be ignored.
Microsoft is also using the potential of artificial intelligence and deep neural networks to enhance the real-time translation of English into Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, and reverse. One of the best examples of these innovations is Dictate which transforms speech into text with the help of speech recognition Cortana and Microsoft Translator, the company’s multilingual machine translation cloud service.
Wrapping Up
Not only in India and across the globe but worldwide too, the dominant position of English online is slowly fading. In the mid-1990s and the mid-1990s, nearly four-fifths of all online content was written in English; since then, it has decreased to just half.
Thus, the desire for language computing and localization is a good business decision for technology firms, manufacturers, OEMs, platform makers, and online publishers.
Linguistic democratization could help increase the number of Indians who benefit from the power of computers and the web. As the challenges of infrastructure and ecosystem are resolved, India’s expanding digital literacy needs to have a multilingual online environment.