This January, MediaNama held an open house discussion on the future of Indic languages online. This is Part 3 of our coverage of the discussion. Read Part 1 here, and Part 2 here. E-commerce and advertising players have been slow to take up Indic languages, even with the huge boost of Indic users that they received post-demonetization. What can be done, therefore, to improve the adoption of Indic languages online, and to bring the quality of Indic user experiences at par with English? No half measures: Dr Govind, who ran NIXI for many years, said: "I feel that half-baked solutions won’t work in these things. Having some content in one language and some content in another language won’t work. We need to work out complete language solutions end-to-end in languages like Hindi, Tamil and Malayalam. "There are many piecemeal solutions. There are no complete solutions for OCR, machine translations. It needs to be perfect, because unless you throw it to the public and work out the various words, the things which are required in the contextual way, the English to Hindi or Malayalam translations — unless we work out in a total solution way, things won’t work out easily for Indic languages. The other thing is that we have to use the languages whatever way it is there, like .bharat domain names are there in Hindi and various language names, so why not use these domain names? Like [Ajay] Data was saying, there’s already an email solution. If we start making the…
