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Unicode as a multilingual standard with reference to Indian languages

Unicode as a multilingual standard with reference to Indian languages India is a country rich in diversity in languages, cultures, customs and religions. Records of this complete culture, secret manuscripts and related documents of the respective religions, and 3,000 years of Indian history are available in their respective languages in different museums and libraries across the country. When the automation of libraries started in India, immediately the issue of localization of library and museum databases emerged. The issue became even more apparent with the advent of digital libraries and interoperability. At the start of automation, in the absence of proper standards, professionals tried to romanize documents as computers used to accept only binary digits of roman script to represent the English language. Later, the development of a new technology, ISCII, which is an extended form of the ASCII values from 126 to 255, helped library professionals in either developing the bilingual bibliographic databases or bilingual text files on DOS or Unix based applications. Gradually the font for Windows‐based applications was developed for creating Web sites or document files. But now, with the requirement of different languages in the world including Indian, there is a forum available called “Unicode, Inc.” which provides a solution to the localization problem of the world's languages. In this paper, Unicode as a multilingual standard is explained and the related technology available for localizing the Indian language materials is discussed. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png The Electronic Library Emerald Publishing

Unicode as a multilingual standard with reference to Indian languages

Rajesh Chandrakar
The Electronic Library , Volume 22 (5): 3 – Oct 1, 2004
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References (2)

Publisher
Emerald Publishing
Copyright
Copyright © 2004 Emerald Group Publishing Limited. All rights reserved.
ISSN
0264-0473
DOI
10.1108/02640470410561947
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

India is a country rich in diversity in languages, cultures, customs and religions. Records of this complete culture, secret manuscripts and related documents of the respective religions, and 3,000 years of Indian history are available in their respective languages in different museums and libraries across the country. When the automation of libraries started in India, immediately the issue of localization of library and museum databases emerged. The issue became even more apparent with the advent of digital libraries and interoperability. At the start of automation, in the absence of proper standards, professionals tried to romanize documents as computers used to accept only binary digits of roman script to represent the English language. Later, the development of a new technology, ISCII, which is an extended form of the ASCII values from 126 to 255, helped library professionals in either developing the bilingual bibliographic databases or bilingual text files on DOS or Unix based applications. Gradually the font for Windows‐based applications was developed for creating Web sites or document files. But now, with the requirement of different languages in the world including Indian, there is a forum available called “Unicode, Inc.” which provides a solution to the localization problem of the world's languages. In this paper, Unicode as a multilingual standard is explained and the related technology available for localizing the Indian language materials is discussed.

Journal

The Electronic Library – Emerald Publishing

Published: Oct 1, 2004

Keywords: India; Languages; Archives; Data handling; Standards; Character recognition equipment

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