Keyboard Design for Indigenous Languages

Hosted at Google in Mountain View. This talk will also be livestreamed via Google Meet, and a recording will be posted to YouTube. Please see Details below.

About this talk:

You take your seat in a crowded room. Suddenly, phones beep and everyone begins reading and typing urgently.

But not you. You cannot read the messages they are feverishly responding to.

Are they alerts? Important safety instructions? Are they texting loved ones? Maybe it is exciting news they are relaying.

Your phone works fine. However, your language is not supported. No one can produce text in your language and send you critical information. And you cannot send questions or share information on any of the numerous text based apps available to those around you.

Using voice is slow and mostly person to person, so not practical in urgent large scale situations.

The Keyboard Creation project of Translation Commons is building virtual keyboards for communities that want access to digital applications in their native language.

In this talk, you will learn about the challenges to creating these keyboards, how we solve them, and the impact the keyboards have had for many communities. These activities are performed by Translation Commons volunteers for free. You will learn how you can nominate projects and even learn how to create keyboards yourself!

Join this discussion to learn about this important step in language digitization and bringing digitally disadvantaged languages to a connected world.

Speakers:

Craig Cornelius is a senior software engineer on the International Engineering team at Google, Inc., joining in 2007. He works on language support across Google, including Android, Search, GMail, and Google Translate. He contributes to the open source Unicode Standard and the work of the Unicode Technical Committees.

Craig’s indigenous language experience began with Cherokee, and he continues to collaborate on projects with the Cherokee Nation and other communities. He serves on the governing boards of the Endangered Languages Project (www.endangeredlanguages.com), Translation Commons (translationcommons.org), and Endangered Alphabets (endangeredalphabets.com). He is a contributing author to “Zero To Digital: A Guide to Bring Your Language Online” with Translation Commons. IMUG presentations include Bringing the Internet to Myanmar in 2017.

He has enjoyed a variety of academic and industry positions, from teaching to academic research and medical imaging. Craig holds a B.A. in chemistry and mathematics from Luther College, and both a Ph.D. in Chemistry and an M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University.”

Tex Texin is an industry thought leader and consultant specializing in software globalization services.

Tex, and his consulting company XenCraft, helped numerous companies create successful global products and guided companies in taking business to new regional markets.

Tex has contributed to several internationalization standards and open source software and has advised several non-profits.
He is an advisor to Translation Commons where he is architecting their Language Digitization Initiative, bringing the languages of Indigenous communities to digital systems. Most recently, Tex has been developing keyboards and related standards for Indigenous languages.

Tex is a popular speaker at conferences around the world. Tex is the owner/author of the popular instructional I18nGuy.com site.

Hosts:

Many thanks to Craig Cornelius and Google for hosting this talk!

Details:
• Parking and entrance are shown on this map: https://www.imug.org/google/
• Networking: 6:30 - 7 PM, and after the talk as time allows.
• Livestream: RSVP, then join the Event Chat for this talk and we will provide more information there.
• Recording: This talk will be recorded and posted to the IMUG YouTube channel after editing and speaker review: https://www.youtube.com/@IMUGorg/videos
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