World Konkani Centre develops Konkanverter to resolve script conflicts

World Konkani Centre develops Konkanverter to resolve script conflicts

Mangalore Today News Network

Mangalore, Aug 10, 2012 : Konkanverter, a script-converting software program that the World Konkani Centre has been working on for the past 2 years, will soon be launched. The centre feels that this project will successfully resolve the Konkani community’s script controversy.

Konkanverter is a software program that automatically converts one script to the other, enabling writers to transliterate Konkani text from one script to the other. It was developed by the research wing of the World Institute of Konkani Language.

Dr. Meena Chandawarkar, vice chanceller of Karnataka State Women’s University in Bijapur, will launch Konkanverter on August 11 at 5:30 p.m. The chief guest of the occasion will be Ramdas Kamath U., senior vice president at Infosys Technologies. The guest of honor will be Fr. Francis Rodrigues, editor of Raknno, and Vinodh Rajan, a language technology expert from Chennai. Basti Vaman Shenoy, president of World Konkani Centre, will preside.

Konkani is written in five scripts—Devnagari, Romi, Malayalam, Kannada, and Perso-Arabic, owing to which the community has been divided into script groups, preventing free flow of literature from one group to another. The presence of a number of scripts has led to a controversy, making the teaching of Konkani in schools and the selection of awards difficult. Since manual transliteration is a time-consuming job, only a handful of works have been transliterated so far.

The World Konkani Centre, under the inspiration of Vision TVM, embarked on this project to resolve script conflicts within the community and to unify all Konkani speaking people. The project leader is Gurudatt Bantwalkar, assistant director of WIKL, and the team comprises Konkani language experts such as Gokuldas Prabhu, Melwyn Rodrigues, Dr. Tanaji Halarnkar, Dr. Rocky Miranda, Damodar Ghanekar, and others along with technical experts such as Hariprasad Nadig of sampada.net.

Konkanverter is available free of charge at www.konkanverter.com.