Regional Blogging in Blogcamp

10Sep06

Blogging in Bengali or as a matter in any other regional indian language requires a person to put a lot of effort says Aparna Ray a regional language blogger and a contributor to Global Voices. The contribution of regional blogging is growing but the unavailability of a fixed key map and the limitations foced on the user due to the unavailability of scripts in the unicode system proves to be a big problem to overcome. Using the roman script can often create a problem to comprehend .For example “paper rat” in bengali means a night of sin which an ordinary English blogger will tend to misinterpret. This would imply a slight modification of the spelling to “Paaper Raat”. A local Bangladeshi company Somewherein a popular bangla platform developed by a Norwegian s/w company based in Bangladesh for bengali bloggers  to blog in their mother tongue has seen something like 60000 people using it daily.

This definitely shows that people are very much interested to blog in regional languages but the unavailability of a a proper platform is what makes people shy away from it. Aparna further told that writing in the regional language makes people toexpress in a better way than in a second language such as English.

Aparna rightly summarised the entire presentation in her

“A Bengali blogging in Bong,
Is not something that has been around long,
So what seems to daunt?
Mainly typing and font
Lets hope Unicode helps us make strong !”

Tags: Blogcamp, Regional Blog

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