About PAN Cambodia

Localization project focuses on documenting the problems and the researching the solutions to enable the localization of ICTs. This project is unique as it will be the first study of its kind which looks at the common problems faced by Asian region and research into a comprehensive solution. It is thus a timely and an urgently needed initiative for Asian underdeveloped populations and would be instrumental towards providing an equitable access to information in this digitally divided information society.

• To develop sustainable human resource capacity in the Asian region for R&D in local language technology
  The human resource pool in most developing Asian countries needs capacity-building to become skilled in enhancing the existing technology to support their Asian languages.
• To raise current levels of technological support for Asian languages Asian languages are in some aspects much more complex than English, some with very complex writing systems. The current technology, initially developed to support English, does not completely support the requirements of many Asian languages and needs to be developed.
• To advance policy for local language content creation and access across Asia for development
  Few studies examine local language problems to devise and recommend effective policy framework to address problems related to accessibility and publication of relevantcontent through ICTs and devise short-term and long-term solutions.

The PAN Localization Project aims at the development of character set, collation and other language standards, fonts, lexica, spell checkers, grammar checkers, search and replace utilities, speech recognition systems, text-to-speech synthesis, machine translation. The Project will assess both Linux and Microsoft platforms for these specific application developments. Different aspects of localization technology will be addressed, including linguistic standardization, computing applications, development platforms, content publishing and access, and effective marketing and dissemination and intellectual property right strategies of the output products.

As the PAN Localization Project will research into problems and solutions for local language computing across Asia for development, it is designed to sample the cultural and linguistic diversity in the whole region. The spread of the research will be carried out by the various countries at strategically different research entry points along the research spectrum, with each country conducting research that is critical in terms of the applications that need to be delivered to the country's user market.

The Project will also build an Asian network of researchers to share learning and knowledge and will publish research outputs including a comprehensive review at the end of the Project, documenting effective processes, results and recommendations.

The countries (and languages) included in the Project are Afghanistan (Pashto, Dari), Bangladesh (Bangla), Bhutan (Dzongkha), Cambodia (Khmer), Laos (Lao), Nepal (Nepali) and Sri Lanka (Sinhala, Tamil).

The implementers of the Project are ICT researchers, practitioners, linguists and policy-makers from government agencies, universities and the private sector. In addition to PAN and CRULP, the following are the participating institutions in this Project:

• Bangladesh : BRAC University
• Bhutan : Department of Information Technology, Ministry of Information and Communications Dzongkha Development Authority, Ministry of Education Sherubste College
• Cambodia: The Committee for Sdandardization of Khmer Script in Computers (CSKSC)
• Laos : Science, Technology and Environment Agency (STEA)
• Nepal : Madan Puraskar Pustakalya Kathmandu University
• Pakistan: Center for Research in Urdu Language Processing,National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences
• Sri Lanka : University of Colombo School of Computing