K Kalyanasundaram is a senior scientist of chemistry at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. But his interest in Tamil computing has resulted in several breakthroughs. He created, ‘Mylai’, one of the earliest Tamil fonts. He also was the project leader of ‘Project Madurai’, an initiavtive to create a database of Tamil literature from Sangam period to contemporary texts, which has today become the inevitable resource of Tamil texts online. He was a founding member of International Forum for Information Technology (INFITT). He was in the city to participate in the 17th World Tamil Internet Conference. In an interaction with Vishnu Swaroop, he spoke on the history and future of Tamil computing, Tamil pedagogy and Project Madurai.
How much has Tamil computing improved in the past years?
When we started in 80s and 90s, there were no standards even for simple text inputs and data transfer across platforms. In the beginning, we removed English characters from ASCII font and replaced it with Tamil. But internally the slotting of every other platform was different. Fortunately we had the Tamil typewriter, on which we modelled the keyboard. Then I used a phonetic keyboard in the same model and created ‘Mylai’ font. Later in 8-bit computers, we retained English characters and made it bilingual in the second stage. In the 1999 Tamil internet conference, there was no consensus on the slotting of characters. People didn’t realise Tamil needed a standard encoding like ASCII. When Unicode came, Tamil purists opposed it as it considered Tamil to be a variant of Devanagiri script. But when Microsoft implemented Unicode, everyone accepted it.
Where does Tamil computing stand today?
Now that we have no more issues in data input, we have started to focus on advanced stuff like developing spell check and grammar check software for Tamil. We need intelligent word processors to implement linguistic concepts. Today there are software these purposes in computers and people have been focussing taking them to mobile platforms. Work on second generation applications such as speech to text converters and text readers, automatic machine translations and optical character recognition are on.
What is the future of Tamil computing?
Today MNCs are becoming bigger players in Tamil computing. Google and Microsoft want to cover Tamil diaspora. Working as individual freelance developers is not feasible anymore. MNCs don’t want to reinvent the wheel, they want to work faster.
There is a popular view that Tamil has fewer technical terms...
Tamil usage itself is different across the world. Words such as ‘neekku’ (delete), ‘vilagu’ (quit), azhi (erase) are used differently across global communities. So we need a standard glossary of Tamil terms. For a standardised method we need more iterations. It is an on-going process as language needs revision. Technical terms are also being framed today.
You have been involved in creating a digital database of Tamil literary texts under the title ‘Project Madurai’. How do you see its success today?
Earlier, only scholars would know whether a particular word has been used in a literary work. Now, using the Project Madurai database, anyone can search for it. This is of great help in linguistics, etymology and systematic literary study. Now that they have a digital database, people have more time for refined thinking than searching books for data. As people are looking for the meaning of the texts, we are working on providing commentaries now.
How do you think technology can change Tamil pedagogy?
Aided by computers, Tamil pedagogy can take a whole new dimension altogether. Today people are writing software to check the grammatical correctness of metric verse. Malaysia and Singapore have already embraced technology to teach Tamil. It is high time Tamil Nadu too goes the tech way. Today technology has become inexpensive, so there’s no excuse to stay away from it.