BENGALURU: Soon, URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) of websites attached to several state government departments will be in Kannada along with the existing English links. This is part of the e-Kannada portal project, developed by the Kannada Development Authority (KDA), and will be launched by CM Basavaraj Bommai on Tuesday. With this, official email IDs of the CM, ministers and other officials will have Kannada letters.
The eKannada portal has been developed by KDA in association with the e-governance department and linguistic experts. KDA Chairman TS Nagabharana told TNIE the eKannada portal will have various services, including a Padakanaja (Kannada dictionary).
In all, 86 Kannada dictionaries, including the one developed by Agriculture University, music and dance experts and others will be uploaded. At present, over 6 lakh words have been uploaded, while they are planning to add 90 lakh words in a phased manner.
The mobile app version of the portal too is available. One can translate from Kannada to English, English to Kannada, speech to text and text to speech, source different fonts and get other services. Nagabharana said many official letters, notifications and even government orders are issued in English and even Kannada letters contain technical words in English.
Took over 1.5 yrs to develop portal
This is because officials do not know Kannada versions of these technical words. “Our application not only helps them get certain words, but also provides letter formats in Kannada. Many departments have been covered, while 30 are still remaining.
We took more than one-and-a-half years to develop the portal and the app. It is an ongoing process and over time, we will add more services’’ he said. The application helps non-Kannadigas learn Kannada, both written and spoken, through the eLearning Kannada platform and it has been developed by a team of experts, he added. The programme has been executed with the assistance of Beluru Sudarshan, Technical Advisor to Bommai, while experts from the Central Linguistic Institute and Kannada University too were involved.
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