You might know how to browse the internet or download your favourite songs, applications and files. Yet how many of you can find a Malayalam equivalent to the terms, ‘browse’, ‘download’ and various such technical terms involved in the information technology? Did any one think of it as necessary to find a Malayalam alternative? Identifying all these needs, the Department of Linguistics, Kerala University is hosting a two-day national seminar on ‘Relevance of Malayalam in the field of Information Technology’ on November 1 and 2. Although studies are going on to make Malayalam a medium in technology, a satisfactory result is yet to be evolved. This also discourages some people from the active use of computer and IT. The seminar hence looks at the language analysis perspective of technology,” says Rose Mary A, head of the department of Linguistics, Kerala University campus, Kariavattom.
The seminar aims at strengthening the possibilities of Malayalam in Information and Communication technologies and addressing the linguistic barrier that prevents people in Kerala from tapping new technologies. Alongside, it also tries to bring together the researchers working on computational linguistics from various institutions to a single platform. In the seminar, areas such as Malayalam computing, cross lingual information extraction, computational lexicography, natural language processing, machine translation, speech synthesis, corpus linguistics, e governance and localisation would be discussed.