M.Jeyapradha
Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Applications,
The Standard Fireworks Rajaratnam College for Women, Sivakasi, Tamil Nadu, India
jeyapradha.m@gmail.com, 8925700293
Abstract:Computing is the goal-based activity for creating work out machinery. It embraces the study and testing of algorithmic processes, and development of both hardware and software. Tamil computing has scientific, mathematical, technological and social aspects. Development of modern technologies, does not affect the growth of classical Tamil, as it is ready to adopt the growing technological changes. Tamil language computing denotes the development of tools and technologies that empower the processing, analysis, and representation of Tamil language data in digital form. These advancements have made it easier for Tamil speakers to express themselves digitally, connect with others, and access Tamil content online. The main theme of this paper is to explore the enduring nature of Tamil language computing which plays a pivotal role in making Tamil accessible and user-friendly in the digital age.
Keywords: Tamil Computing, Technology, Digital, Software tools
Introduction
Tamil language has proven its resilience over time by adapting to changing trends, incorporating technological advancements, and embracing language computing. The sustained development of Tamil language computing tools and resources holds huge prospective for further empowering Tamil speakers, enhancing literacy rates, preserving cultural heritage, and adopting a successful Tamil digital ecosystem. The influence of technology on language use and maintenance in the Tamil situation has never involved any imposition upon the speakers of a language, but has been one where changes evolved reluctantly and naturally along the way as the technology developed. The developments in electronic media influenced the standardization of a digital code for every letter in the language. The graphic rendering of Tamil scripts and typesetting technology further changed the way the Tamil letters looked as far as their aesthetical appeal. This helped in the evolution of many online newspapers, with the result that the use of the Tamil language, as well as the distribution of knowledge via “electronic” Tamil, was able to create a new dimension of the globalizing media. Computing language is very necessary to do more research in Tamil and speed up development of the language throughout the world. Motivating students in developing Tamil computing applications and software will help take the latest technologies to more Tamil people and spread their culture and tradition across the world. “The TN government has allotted Rs.800 crore for developing websites, Rs.450 crore for computerizing the public distribution system (PDS), and Rs.1,000 crore for e-governance, all of which will be bilingual—Tamil and English—henceforth,” says state IT minister Poongothai Aladi Aruna.
Objectives of Tamil Computing
- To embrace modern trends and leverage computing techniques to make the language more accessible and user-friendly.
- To develop various software applications, fonts, and input methods for enabling seamless Tamil typing, text processing, and content creation.
- To make it easier for young learners to create and share content, conduct online discussions, and collaborate on projects, fostering a vibrant Tamil learning ecosystem using Tamil computing tools.
Challenges and its Overcomes
Understanding information in the mother tongue gives the feeling of enjoying juice of fruit. The challenges and risks thrown on Tamil for its technological development includes digitization, switching over to Unicode fonts, converting the already available digitalized material into Unicode format by font converter, creation of linguistic or language technological resources for Tamil computing and other efforts for the technological development of Tamil. At the risk or loss level, Tamil faces the distortion of numerous types in the digital media such as mixed coding, corrupt and ungrammatical vocabularies, and use of slangs. This practice may lead to the loss of the language, culture and various other unique features of the language.
There exist many challenges based on the grammar of language. Tamil is the classical regional language that is rich in Morphology, contains more processing challenges. The Natural Language Processing (NLP) technique along with Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) algorithms are help to overcome those challenges. The accuracy of work is depending on the corpus provided to train the model.
Technology behind Tamil Computing
Technology is the application of theoretical knowledge for attaining practical goals. In 2021 onwards, 74% of people in India have access internet using Tamil.
Search Engines in Tamil
The “Search Engines” is a software system to search any information from the cyber space. During the past some years, different methodologies have been introduced to search a non-English language documents. Because of the different encoding in Tamil, it was no success to establish the search engine to search the all kind of documents. Later many of these enthusiasts and software developers joined together with Tamilnadu Government also announced two standard encodings Tamil Bilingual Encoding (TAB) and Tamil Monolingual Encoding and (TAM). Inappropriately, these standards do not seem to have many converts among the popular Tamil websites.
For Tamil, there are more than 50 encoding and the international convention has introduced ‘Unicode’ coding standard. Resource Centre for Indian Language Technology Solutions create the project called Bavaani to handled different encoding for Tamil searching. Example for some search engines are Google, Bing and Yahoo take first three places respectively. Google and Bing provide searching facilities in Tamil with inbuilt Tamil virtual keyboard.
Tamil e-Library
E-Libraries are portal or website of group of e-books. Tamil e-Library facilities provide thousands of Tamil Books as e-books generally at free of cost. It is the most useful service to Tamil people who live far away from their homeland. Features of Tamil e-Library:
- It can willing to adopt innovations in technology providing users with improvements in electronic and audio book technology as well as presenting new forms of communication such as wikis and blogs.
- The user can able to use any search term (word, phrase, title, name, and subject) to search the entire collection in Tamil.
- It can provide very user-friendly interfaces, giving clickable access to its resources.
Tamil Typing and Interface software
Typing Tamil using Tamil interface software is a familiar one among the different methods of typing. This is the simplest way of typing Tamil in both Computer and Smart phones. Familiar Tamil Keyboard Interface:
• NHM Writer, E-Kalappai and Lippikar – are familiar Tamil keyboard interfaces software used for Tamil typing which works on Tamil Unicode, using phonetics.
• Sellinam and Ponmadal – are familiar Tamil keyboard framework that works on Android operating system in Smartphone using phonetics.
Tamil Office Automation Applications
Commonly used Office automation software’s like Microsoft Office, Open Office etc., provides complete Tamil interface layouts. This software’s are downloadable and installed in your computer. After installation, your office automation software environment will completely change to Tamil. Menu bars, names of icons, dialog boxes are show in Tamil. In addition to that, it allows saving files with Tamil names and creating folders with Tamil names. Apart from that Tamil Libra Office, Tamil Open Office, Azhagi Unicode Editor, Ponmozhi, Menthamiz, Kamban, Vani are office automation software working entirely for Tamil.
Tamil Translation Applications
Translation is a highly complex task, so it is only natural that various technologies and specialized tools have emerged to help with it. This could be as basic as a dictionary app with a built-in automatic translator or something more sophisticated like an AI-powered Chabot that can hold conversations in multiple languages.
Thamizpori (தமிழ்பொறி) is a Tamil translation application having more than 30000 Tamil words equivalent to English words. Google also gives an online translation facility. In 2006, Google Translate was launched with the help of Google Neural Machine Translation (GNMT).
Tamil Programming Language
Ezhil (எழில்) is a Tamil programming language based on Python language. With the help of Tamil keywords and grammar, the native Tamil speaker write programs in the Ezhil system. Ezhil allows the user to represent the computer program closer to the Tamil language logical constructs equivalent to the conditional, branch and loop statements in modern English based programming languages. Ezhil is a procedural programming language aimed towards Tamil speaking novice computer users. Ezhil is the first open source language available for Tamil. Some sample statements are
- PRINT statement – பதிப்பி
- BREAK statement – நிறுத்து
- CONTINUE statement – தொடர்
- RETURN statement – பின்கொடு
Tamil Information Interchange Coding Systems
- TSCII (Tamil Script Code for Information Interchange) – is a coding system for representing the Tamil script. Computers use ASCII encoding system to handle data and information. The ASCII encoding system is applicable only for handling English language. Therefore, TSCII is the first coding system to handle our Tamil language. This encoding scheme was register in IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) a unit of ICANN.
- ISCII (Indian Script Code for Information Interchange) – Ithas not been used outside certain government institutions, although a variant without the ATR mechanism was used on classic Mac OS, Mac OS DevanagariThis is one of the encoding schemes specially designed for Indian languages including Tamil.
- Unicode – Unicode is an encoding system, aimed to handle various world languages, including Tamil. Its first version 1.0.0 was introduced in October 1991. Unicode is the best suitable scheme to handle Tamil.
Tamil Operating System
An operating system is need to access electronic systems such as computer and smart phone. Microsoft Windows is very standard operating system for personal computers. Windows Tamil Environment interface displays all window elements such as Taskbar, desktop elements, names of icons, commands in Tamil.
5. Benefits procures from Tamil Computing Techniques
- Tamil Virtual Academy:
The Govt. of Tamilnadu established Tamil Virtual University on 17 February 2001. Now, this organization functioning with the name “Tamil Virtual Academy”. This organization offers different courses regarding Tamil language from kindergarten to under graduation level.
- Madurai Project:
Project Madurai is an open source and voluntary initiative to collect and publish free electronic editions of earliest Tamil literary classics, which means either typing-in or scanning old books and archiving the text in readily accessible formats for use on all popular computer platforms. Project Madurai released in TSCII encoding Tamil script form. Since 2004, they started publishing e-books in Tamil Unicode as well.
- ICT in Education
To strengthen the integration of ICT into curriculum, pedagogy and assessment to enhance learning and develop competencies for the 21st century which help Tamils and non-Tamils including children to learn and develop skills in Tamil language.
- Connecting the digital divide with Tamil coding
One of the challenges in introducing computer science concepts at a middle-school level is that programming languages are in English. Ezhil facilitates coding in Tamil not just by replacing the English keywords with Tamil ones but also with a grammar, and logical sequence similar to the spoken language. Ezhil is a programming language aimed towards Tamil speaking novice computer users.
- Technical App for Tamil
With the advancement of technology like machine learning, deep learning, transfer learning and AI, many software were designed for Handwritten Tamil character reorganization, sentiment analysis for Tamil code, Tamil Blogging, Text to Speech generators for Tamil Language, Tools for Tamil grammar learning and teaching etc.,
6. Conclusion
Learning technology in our mother tongue creates more creativity. So almost all are working to include regional language into technology. One of the main objectives of TIC is to stimulate the interest of the younger generation in Tamil computing. With the improvement of computing technologies, many ideas are advanced to carry the work forward through the next several years through special efforts in areas such as computational linguistics with Artificial Intelligence (AI) to develop algorithms that can simulate human-like intelligence.
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