‘Konkanverter’, a technological initiative that was started two years ago by the World Konkani Centre, will be launched on Saturday at the World Konkani Centre, said Gurudath Bantwalkar, Assistant Director, World Institute of Konkani Language, Mangalore, in a press release.
The converter is expected to resolve a major conflict among different sections of the Konkani-speaking community. The software programme is an automatic script converter to help people transliterate any Konkani text from the source script to a script of their choice.
It has been developed by the research wing of the institute. It was inspired by T.V. Mohandas Pai, former Human Resources Director, Infosys.
Konkanverter has been developed by a team of people led by Mr. Bantwalkar, Melwyn Rodrigues, poet, Gokuldas Prabhu, Tanaji Halarnkar, Rocky Miranda, Damodar Ghanekar and technical experts such as Hariprasad Nadig of Sampada.net as advisors.
Online, free
The online, free to use, automatic script converter software will be inaugurated by Meena Chandawarkar, Vice-Chancellor, Karnataka State Women’s University, Bijapur. Ramdas Kamath U, Senior Vice President, Infosys Technologies, will be chief guest. Francis Rodrigues, Editor, Raknno Konkani weekly and Vonodh Rajan, expert in language technology from Chennai, will be guests of honour. Basti Vaman Shenoy, President, World Konkani Centre, will preside over the function.
Wider reach
The converter will help Konkani writers reach to a wider readership four times more than the current number. It will be accessible to people across various scripts. It can be used in every Konkani language website and can be used for offline publishing and e-books. Some original lexical and dialectical forms of Konkani could be unearthed, which could benefit the entire community rather than be restricted to parts of the community. Research scholars will no longer be restricted by scripts.
For details, seewww.konkanverter.com, said the release.
