Computer… Oh! It is an English object...!  You need literacy in English to operate a computer. That was a popular discussion when we start our computer - journey in early 2000s. In that time even I didn’t has a high English literacy (not even now).  Some people asked me, “Can you operate a computer with less English knowledge?”. At that time I didn’t has a proper answer. Because when I go through a wizard kind of flow, I couldn’t understand what it means. But most of the simple tasks don’t need a high English knowledge.

But how about today?. After about 8 years the English is not a necessity. See my desktop. It’s all in Sinhala. Today no one should be fear about the language, to working with a computer. The story is going to be so nice. Many software applications were released in Sinhala today. But it is in primary stage. But it is happening. We have to so much thankful to the force that was behind Sinhala Unicode introducing battle. Actually it was a battle. Not like English, Sinhala is a very complex language. It has basic 60 characters. In addition to that there are many more symbols that join with each letter such as papilla, ispilla, edaya, kombuwa etc. As my count, there are 80 characters in Sinhala Unicode character set. But only 26 keys available in key board to represent letters. Because of other keys are very useful, whether it is Sinhala or English.  

But, now we have a standard. All application developers are following this standard. As a result of that we were very happy to see windows vista, with more Sinhala functionalities. Some of my favorites are calendar, windows explorer and language support in internet explorer.    

 

When I saw this calendar for the first time in Tech ed 2006, I was so amazed. Because of the date is not in just <day> <date> <Month><Year> format. It has been nicely interconnected using two nice words.  After the name of the month, the word “MASA” and after the date the word “WENIDA” has been nicely interconnected each part of the date and gives total Sinhalese feeling for the date.

  

  

What do you think about my windows explorer view?  Just have a look at “Path” area, “Favorite Links” area, and “File / Folders List” area. It is my computer. So it is my mother tongue. Windows vista supports to have Sinhalese file names also. There would be a small issue, if relevant application package doesn’t support Unicode file names. But fortunately Microsoft office and most of commonly using applications are supporting this feature. 

This is how the concept “Localization” is supporting our language. The Sinhala language support in Operating System is only one side of Localization. When it comes to the internet, the concept is highly adopted. Today we have a nice Sinhala interface in Google search page also. The words used in site may be become unfamiliar at the first look. But when we are using these Sinhala computer words for few times, it will become very familiar to us.

I found few web sites which can be read in Sinhala. Most of them are government ministries’ or departments’ web sites. With the support of ICTA, the localization concept was nicely implemented in those web sites. Today anyone who can’t understand English can easily interact with those web sites, and can have the maximum usage of ICT without having language barriers.

 

Other than government web sites, the other set of web sites, which uses Sinhala in high scale, is Sinhala newspaper’s web sites. Today as a habit, most of us click on Lankadeepa.lk, Lakbima.lk or Diwaina.com in every morning to read daily news papers’ top stories.

What about blogging in mother tongue? It is not a nightmare no more. Haven’t you visited “kottu” site, which is providing multilingual blogging, which is most popular sinhala blog arena. By today, the most popular blogging site, blogger has also allowed us to blog in our mother tongue. Social networking is so cool… but since we need to communicate using some others’ language it will not be sooo much cool. That’s why localization is highly important in such areas.

Today boundaries of localization have been spread to whole digital world. It hasn’t limited to “the Computer”. Using Sinhala language in digital devices is another latest concept. Nokia, the most popular mobile phone manufacturer released their first ever mobile phone which has Sinhala language capabilities in year 2006. Now Sinhala enable mobile phone will not be a surprise any more. We can have such phone even for less than 5000 rupees.

Last month I bought a CDMA telephone from SLT. Amazing! It is also support Sinhala capabilities. The menu can be read completely in Sinhala.

But still I didn’t see an operating-menu of a television in Sinhala. I Hope that dream will become a reality in very recent future…