6 Reasons Why We Keep Failing at Digital Development Interventions
Clearing out boxes of old books and reports recently, I was struck by how many ICT4D initiatives there have been over the last 20 years, many of which have simply...
Help Bridge the Language Translation Technology Digital Divide
In the digital age, when we face a language barrier, there are a host of internet resources to overcome it. We often rely on translation platforms, dictionary apps,...
BASAbali: How the Internet Can Save Local Languages
The Balinese Cultural Agency estimates that less than a fourth of Balinese can still speak the Balinese language. Worldwide it is believed that “by the end...
It’s 2017, You Should be Localizing Your ICT4D Solutions Already
Many ICT4D projects have a major strike against them before they even begin: they use international languages instead of local ones. The intended audience not only...
Translating Technology Terms Into Burmese
Earlier this summer, Thomas Fuller of the New York Times published a memo from Yangon lamenting the lack of political vocabulary in the Burmese language, in which...
How Digital Tools Can Support Reading Culture in Laos
In the course of a six-month, one-woman survey of public Internet access venues in Vientiane, I spent most of my time in Laos’s capital city in libraries and...
Respect Myanmar’s Ethnic Diversity: Use Unicode Fonts Online
Burmese is the dominant language of Myanmar, but its had a long and winding journey in the digital realm, and now there is a tension between two competing systems...
Language as a Cultural Barrier in ICT4E Deployments
When I started working on my ICT4E project a few months back, I thought I had all of my bases covered. It’s easy to fall into that groove. I learned quickly, however,...
What if I gave you a fully loaded Macbook Air filled with content in Klingon?
That is what I think many good intentioned people do when they install computer systems without locally relevant content – they deploy the equivalent of a...