In 2019, Translations Commons published “Indigenous Languages: Zero to Digital”, a guide to creating digital infrastructure for indigenous communities. Using flowcharts and clear instructions, it explains how to create every level of the technology stack required to make a language usable online. This easy-to-understand and ground-breaking resource was co-authored with several partners in language and […]
Of the world’s 7,000 languages, approximately half have some kind of writing system. Enabling digital support for all of these writing systems is a monumental undertaking. The Unicode standard has encoded 151 scripts—alphabets, syllabaries, and so on—as of the latest version. These include everything from common alphabets like Latin and Cyrillic to Han characters (used […]
In a previous post, we introduced the Balinese Lontar Project that PanLex is managing, in coordination with the Internet Archive and Udayana University. We have some exciting updates from the last two months. The team at Pusat Kajian Lontar at Udayana has given us great feedback, PanLex’s transcription platform is now live at palmleaf.org, and […]
In 2011, the Internet Archive photographed nearly the entire collection of Balinese palm-leaf manuscripts (130,000 leaves in all) as part of an effort to bring out of the shadows the lesser-known literatures of the world and to inspire others to do the same. These traditional Balinese texts were inscribed with a special triangular iron stylus […]