Kannada may have slowly made its way into the digital space, but exploring the IT capital with an online map has been restricted to those who know English, leaving a large section of society cut off from the use of maps.
But all that is set to change, thanks to a crowd-sourced attempt, which has now made almost 80 per cent of the freely-available OpenStreetMap (OSM) showing Kannada names within the State.
The ones who are expected to benefit the most is the large community of drivers attached to cab aggregators. For example there is auto driver Gangadharaiah, who says the maps that come along with the mobile phone are “useless” as all the details are in English.
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Yogesh K.S., who has contributed extensively on translations, says that nearly 23,000 locations are shown in Kannada in the State. “Almost every major street and even villages are now in Kannada. The focus has been in Bengaluru, where only commercial establishments are remaining,” he says.
More than 200 volunteers have participated in the crowd-sourced attempt, with a core group of 25 persons meeting up frequently to translate names. The process was expedited in the Bangalore Mapping Party, held in March and June, where software professionals discussed projects within OSM.
Getting Kannada labels is a long, often cumbersome process. It took nearly five years for hundreds of contributors to make a detailed English ‘base map’. Mr. Yogesh and others then had to remove all the English names, and manually translate these into Kannada.
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“Initially, it was difficult as we were still getting to know the tools. We figured out ways to type in Kannada names in the web browser itself,” he says.