Enhancement of Bangla Language in ICT: Project to uphold Mother Tongue

Posts and Telecommunications Ministry and the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Division took a project titled “Enhancement of Bangla Language in ICT through Research and Development” with the hope of upholding our mother tongue across the world. 

A keyboard will be installed for the ethnic minority languages under the project.  The project will be implemented under the supervision of Bangladesh Computer Council.

According to their prospectus on this project, “Bangla is an influential language considering the number of Bengali speaking people across the world, it has a glorious history, but no effort has been made to make this language technology friendly. It’s a matter of sorrow, but the good news is a project is underway to make this language technology friendly.”

“In the time of technological growth to make Bangladesh a digital state we have to make Bangla as a technology friendly language. Implementing Bangla language in Information and Communication sector will be a milestone on this purpose,” claimed the prospectus.

Being asked about the possible time to inaugurate this service Junaid Ahmed Polok, MP, State Minister for Information and Communication Technology said, “a component of the project has already been published which is hosted at the National Data Center. Another component will be released this month (April 2021). The outcome of the project has already begun to come out and at the end of the trial version every service, software and tools will be open to the public.

Motto of this project

Its purpose is to establish Bengali as a leading language in information technology and globally. In particular, the main objective of the project is to adapt the Bengali language to computing and ICT.

Describing the purpose of this project Junaid Ahmed Polok, MP, State Minister for Information and Communication Technology said that to the report.

“Establishing Bengali as the language of the United Nations requires a variety of resources, including real-time automatic speech-to-speech machine translation. This project is creating these services,” he added.

Various software, tools and resources which will be used for Bengali language through different technologies will be developed so that there is no obstacle in using this language in computer. 

Facilities to offer

“Many services and resources of language technology and artificial intelligence are being created under the project. These include 20 public facing services, 16 research tools and resources, 08 types of standard and printed resources and 10 types of corpus,” Junaid Ahmed Polok, MP informed.

As per the prospectus on this project “after implementing this Bangali speaking people would be able to check bangla spell, grammatical error and possible test of Unicode value, to convert bangla font, to convert into IPA from bangla, sentimental analysis of bangla language.”

“There will be some others facilities including Machine translator, Bangla style guide, and Service platform. Bangla OCR, speech to text and text to speech, Bangla corpus, National keyboard also will be available,” the prospectus added.

Implementation for the ethnic people 

A keyboard and a digital archive will be installed for the ethnic minority languages under the project to ensure the use of these languages online.

“The language of the minority ethnic groups in Bangladesh is used very little in online platform. Since there are no quality documentation, recourses and materials some of these languages are in danger,” said the prospectus. 

“Although many languages do not have adequate digital data, fonts and encoding, it is possible to make these languages technology friendly by using digital resources. We will install keyboard software following the national standards for languages that have their own alphabet, and there will be a digital archive for other languages,” the prospectus furthered. 

“Digital resources of small ethnic groups are being created through this project, resources through which languages can be preserved. In addition, keyboards in several languages are being developed through this project so that those languages can be published and written digitally,” the State Minister for Information and Communication Technology said.

“It is hoped that the publication and institutional recognition will further increase the use of their alphabet by minority language speakers. A trilingual dictionary is also being created for several languages. In the process, ethnic minorities are expected to become more involved with their language and script,” he furthered. 

Social Media is a great platform to learn and practice any mother tongue as young generation spent their notable time using social media. It is a timely initiative, but we have to be serious in implementing this; otherwise we will found a translation like ethnic language textbooks, Neeti Chakma, a third year student of Dhaka University said.

“The history and vocabulary, especially the keywords, of those dialects must have to be included in the dictionary,” she added.

Expressing gratefulness to the concerned authority for their wonderful initiative,   Khingmukay Marma, a first year student of Dhaka University, said that the joy of expressing thoughts in mother tongue is not the same as expressing thoughts in state language. We are grateful that the government is giving us that opportunity.

Opportunity for the disabled people

Under this project they have some plans for visually disabled and other disabled persons to offer them practicing mother tongue in digital platform.

Screen reader software will be installed for the blind people; they could be able to use mobile phone and computer using this software. This software will read out the text that will be shown on phone or computer screen. Using it visually disabled person will be able to give command.

Sign to Speech software for speech and hearing impairment persons is being developed through the component. With this software, a user can express their opinions with sign language by sitting on a PC with a camera, Smartphone or tab, which will be converted to Unicode through that software.

Md. Tawfiq Hosen, a visually disabled student of Sociology department of Dhaka University, said that this is undoubtedly a manifestation of government’s goodwill about the disabled people.

“We were detached from the Bengali Literature as it was used to a very limited extent. But now if such a project is implemented, we will be able to get engaged with Bengal as extensively as English literature,” he added.

Manjur Hossain Mahi, a Journalism student of Dhaka University (DU) said that being able to communicate in one’s mother tongue virtually is a great pleasure. So I think if this project is implemented, it will be a milestone.

As far as I know, ethnic people cannot communicate in their own language virtually. Now if they develop keyboards for these languages, ethnic people will be able to communicate in their own language easily, he added.