AsiaLIFE

Using Facebook, Google and Twitter in Khmer script used to be a distant dream. To realise it required taking on the world’s largest technology companies. As the tenth anniversary of a debate that decided the future of Khmer in cyberspace nears, Michael Sloan finds out what happened.

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Walking into an amphitheatre at Microsoft’s European headquarters in front of a 200-strong audience of programmers, executives and onlookers, Cambodia’s Secretary of State for Commerce Pan Sorasak felt slightly nervous.

It was May 2002 and a Cambodian delegation had flown halfway around the world to Dublin to present the case for a workable version of Khmer script to be added to a list of languages supported by the Unicode Consortium - an alliance of the world’s largest technology companies including Microsoft, IBM and Apple.

The consortium decides how text in various languages is stored and shown on computer operating systems around the world. Or put simply, when you send an email written in Mandarin, whether it will show up on a computer as gibberish or readable text.

“We knew it was going to be an uphill battle. They’d arranged it so it looked like a court or a tribunal and we were so new and so young. We were thinking, ‘how are we going to fight with these big guys?’” says Sorasak.

When it came to Unicode, the Kingdom at that time had a problem. The government had been planning to develop a workable version of Khmer script for computers, only to find it had been beaten to it.

The Unicode Consortium already had a version of the Khmer alphabet included in its list of supported languages, with one small problem: no Cambodian could understand it.

“The story was that during the 1990s there was a foreigner living here who said, ‘OK I know Cambodian’ and submitted a Khmer alphabet to them,” says Sorasak.

“It was complete gibberish. We couldn’t use it, it was completely wrong. What we didn’t know is the policy of Unicode is very tough. Once a language is there you cannot change it.”

Facing off against Sorasak’s team at Microsoft headquarters was the British author of the unintelligible Khmer script, with both parties presenting their case to the consortium’s board members over the next several hours.

“We were right at thebottom of this huge amphitheatre with a big row of seats behind us and people watching,” says Sorasak.

“We had a really big battle telling them explaining to them what was wrong. It took a long time and it was an uphill battle, but once we pointed out all the errors and the other gentleman lost, he just said goodbye and walked away and hasn’t been seen since.”

The upshot of the debate was a letter of apology from the consortium’s president and full support for an overhaul of Khmer Unicode - something Sorasak’s team accomplished in 2004 when its version was approved for use by the Institute of National Language at the Cambodian Royal Academy.

A series of tweaks followed enabling people to write Unicode in different fonts. Before its creation, Cambodians could paste Khmer characters over Roman ones in programs like Word by using a number of legacy fonts such as Limon. The system, although useful for typing, was incompatible with phones and web browsers.

Sorasak says that creating Khmer Unicode has opened the door for companies to create Khmer language versions of their software.

“Now that it works and it’s out there it’s up to them, and the sky’s the limit,” he says.

One company taking advantage of Khmer Unicode is the Mozilla Corporation, which plans to release a Cambodian version of its popular web browser Firefox in the near future.

Mozilla’s director of release engineering, John O’Duinn, says he was inspired to help create it after visiting Cambodia in 2006 and watching three monks struggling use a computer which displayed menus in English.

“I happen to be lucky that I spoke English as a kid. I had a certain moment watching these monks where I realised that if computers had all come in Japanese I’d have had no chance to learn how to use them,” he says.

“These guys had to be bilingual before they could surf the web to check the price of an airfare, or news from another country, that stuck with me and bugged me a lot.”

O’Duinn, who has now finished 98 percent of Firefox in Khmer, believes his work would not have been possible without the earlier efforts of Sorasak’s team.

“If it wasn’t there, we wouldn’t have a chance,” he says.

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