Get your Domain Names in Malayalam Script in 2012

Kerala IT News
July 15, 2011

Come 2012 and you should be able to get your domain name in major Indian language scripts. Applications for generic top-level domains (gTLD) will be open from January 12, 2012 to April 12, 2012. This was disclosed by D. Govind, Sr. Director, DeitY & CEO, NIXI while addressing an awareness raising national workshop on Internationalised Domain Names (IDN) organised by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in Thiruvananthapuram.

The workshop is a result of the joint efforts of the ICANN and the Government of India to enable the availability of domain names in Indian languages. The gTLD programme would result in a dramatic increase in TLD. Henceforth, domain names will be able to end in any word in any language. While giving an overview of the DeitY’s initiatives in IDN, he also mentioned that there are still several issues that need to be resolved due to the complexity of Indian scripts. Malayalam is one of the seven languages that have been selected for the second phase of this project. The first phase covers seven most popular Indian languages.

Ravindra Kumar, ED, C-DAC, Thiruvananthapuram spoke about the language initiatives in Malayalam undertaken by C-DAC, Thiruvananthapuram. OCR for Malayalam scripts, Text to Speech (text reader), Braille Mozhi and English to Malayalam translation are some of the initiatives.

M D Kulkarni, Associate Director & Head, GIST, C-DAC Pune said that this would herald a new horizon for domain names in Indian Scripts. The GIST group has been the pioneer of Indian language computing and being associated with the IDN initiative has broadened its perspective on the web front.