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Bhutan's
Culture: Dzongkha |
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Bhutan Information |
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Dzongkha
computing on Linux |
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| The
Dzongkha Development Authority, the Department of Information and Technology
and Sherubtse College in Kanglung are working together to enable Dzongkha
computing on the Linux operating system.
It
is part of a larger project on developing local language computing capacity
in Asia. Besides Bhutan, the project and which is underway in Bangladesh,
Cambodia, Laos, Nepal, and Sri Lanka.
PAN
localizing project focuses on documenting the problems and researching
the solutions to enable localisation of ICT according to a Pan Asia Networking
journal. |
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In
Bhutan, the project started in May 2005. "It is a cheaper way of providing
Dzongkha computing to those who can read and write Dzongkha because the
Linux system is free," said project manager Jigme Tenzing.
The
Department of Information and Technology has engaged three of its programmers,
the Dzongkha Development Authority is shouldering the responsibility of
font-logging, development and modification and translation, and Sherubtse
College is in-charge of the quality control and bug testing.
"Translating
the computer menus to Dzongkha has been most taxing," said Jigme Tenzing.
"We are only translating most commonly used 28,000 messages leaving aside
a major portion. To do a complete job would require translating some 150,000
messages," Jigme Tenzing said.
The
department has also hired a consultant from India while the professionals
involved with the project went to Pakistan last year for a training. So
far, the project had developed input capabilities, keyboard drivers, locale,
coalition sequence and rendering engine to display Dzongkha characters
on the monitor.
According
to Jigme Tenzing it would take another two years to be able to use Dzongkha
word, excel, emails, websites, and have a small distribution of the programmes
in CDs. Jigme Tenzing said Dzongkha computing on LINUX was an enhancement
to an operating system. It was also using Unicode based fonts which made
reading documents easy on any operating system.
According
to DIT officials, programmes developed for Dzongkha computing on other
operating systems like Microsoft so far was not user-friendly and automated.
It required some configuring. But it is expected to overcome this with
the next release of Longhorn.
| Contributed
by Bishal Rai, Kuensel 2005 |
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