‘Dividends of ICT must be taken to the village in Sinhala and Tamil’

“‘If the dividends of ICT are to be taken to every village, every citizen and every business’ it has to be done in Sinhala and Tamil,” said ICT Agency of Sri Lanka (ICTA) Board Member and Local Language Initiative (LLI) Chairman Dr. R. B. Ekanayake, said while participating at a multi-pronged launch that took place at Jaic Hilton, Colombo recently .

Presenting an overview of the LLI during the past seven years Dr. Ekanayake said, ‘If the dividends of ICT are to be taken to every village, every citizen…’ it had to be done in Sinhala and Tamil. Explaining the rationale for the LLI Dr. Ekanayake said: “Most people in Sri Lanka use Sinhala and Tamil.

Most are not conversant in English. English is necessary but learning a foreign language takes time. The ICTA Local Language Initiative (LLI) therefore had to be implemented immediately after ICTA was set up”.

This implementation took place and in the recent past several projects have been completed under ICTA’s “Local Language Initiative” and the event was held to launch the following:-

a. The third revision of the Sri Lanka Sinhala Character Code for Information Interchange which has been approved by SLSI as a Sri Lanka Standard, SLS 1134 : 2011. This version includes encoding for Sinhala numerals. This is to be launched in partnership with the Sri Lanka Standards Institution (SLSI).

b. Six new stylized Sinhala fonts have been designed by the trainees who underwent ICTA’s font development training. – There has been resistance from various sectors towards using Unicode fonts citing the fact that only “serious” Unicode fonts were available. Now several Unicode Sinhala fonts of different styles have been developed.

c. A new Unicode Tamil font ‘Sri Tamil’ .

d. Six new stylized Tamil fonts - “Chemmoli” series.

e. A book on how to develop Sinhala and Tamil fonts.

f. A keyboard driver for using Apple Mac with a Unicode Sinhala font - Mac Bhashitha.

Presenting of certificates to font developers and tokens of appreciation to Local Language Working Group (LLWG) also took place on this occasion.

A certificate was given to those who developed stylized Sinhala Unicode fonts. This font development took place under the training on Developing Unicode Local Language Fonts that ICTA held in partnership with the University of Colombo School of Computing.

The font developers who thus received certificates were: Nirmali Kaushalya Allahendra for the font ‘Puskola Potha’, Nirmala Handapangoda – for the font ‘NYH’, Warna Somaratna for the font ‘Warana, and Winne Hettigoda for the fonts–‘Winnie’ and ‘Winnie 1’ and Sushikshita Sasirichandra de Silva for the font ‘SS – Sulakna’.

A memento was given to the members of the Local language Working Group for providing direction and policy for ICTA’s Local Language Initiative, during the past seven years.

The present LLWG members’ Dr. R. B. Ekanayake (Chairman), Prof. V. Kumar, Dr. Ruvan Weerasinghe, Channa de Silva, Prof. Gihan Dias, Dineesha Ediriweera, G. Balachandran, Dr. Sandagomi Coperahewa, Chamara Dissanayake, Venerable Bhikkhu Mettavihari Thero, Harsha Wijaywardhana, J. Yogaraj, Susil Maduwage and N. Sivakumaran.

Former LLWG Chairperson, Dr. Shahani Weerawarne, and former LLWG members Mahesh Perera and Anura Tissera were among those who contributed tremendously towards the success of the Local Language Initiative.

Late Professor and ICTA Chairman V. K. Samaranayake was the pioneer in the field of development of the use of local languages in ICT. He provided leadership to the arena of local languages in ICT. He was a visionary on what should happen in the area.

Participating in the event, ICTA Board and LLI team member Professor V. Kumar explained the key benefits that have accrued to users as a result of the Local Language Initiative. “Thanks to the LLI, we are now free from many of the past cumbersome procedures like having to send the font to the recipient when emailing a local language document,” he said.

Addressing the audience on “Language trends over the years” Professor J. B. Disanayaka showed how subjects that look highly academic could be presented in a humorous way.

Narrating the development of the current 61-character Sinhala alphabet the Professor said that as far as he knew the sangngakaya of ja was found only in the word inju, a vocative case word.

Disseminating many a message in spite of a lighter vein the Professor pointed out the importance of working out a standard method for correctly transliterating in the Roman (English) script the Sinhala and Tamil proper names and place names (e.g., Wellawatta, Kegalle).