November 29, 2000

Native tongues
Software lets devices speak to world markets

Convergence is all about extending the reach of digital data further into everyday life. But what about the hundreds of millions of people worldwide for whom English is a shaky second language (or even a complete mystery)? Are they to be left out? A company called WordWalla thinks not. WordWalla has introduced a series of products that give product developers the ability to create devices that operate in a user's native language.

GlobalType is a platform-independent font-rendering engine designed to produce high-quality type in low-memory and low-bandwidth environments, such as mobile phones and PDAs. GlobalType-compressed fonts are available for more than 55 languages, and additional languages can be added quickly and easily without modifying the core application. Wordwalla's proprietary compression algorithms are particularly useful for compressing outline and bitmap fonts, especially with large or complex character sets such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

The company's Java-based multilingual text-input and text-display engine, dubbed GlobalWrite, includes virtual keyboards, front-end processors, a contextual processor, and a text-layout engine for left-to-right and right-to-left language formatting.

The products don't provide translation to other languages or English—we'll have to wait at least a few years for that. But even giving users the ability to type using a native-language keypad could provide a product with a significant edge in the marketplace.

The architecture of the multilingual engine also allows for easy integration of handwriting-recognition engines and speech-recognition technology. The products are available in both Java and C/C++ implementations.

—Leah Jiorle