Geneva Software Technologies in Bangalore, India, has developed software that will translate English text messages into multiple languages and send a translation to any cellular phone or mobile device in the world, no matter what character set it’s programmed to use. India’s Ministry of Science and Technology announced in February that it intends to use Geneva’s system to deliver disaster alerts.Existing text-messaging technology requires that both sender and receiver have devices that use Unicode, the standard international system for representing characters on a digital screen. But in rural areas of developing countries, few people can afford Unicode-compliant handsets.

The system Geneva devised can display characters from 14 Indian languages — and 57 others used around the world — without the need for common standards. Instead, language characters are transmitted as pictures encoded in simple binary format, which almost any phone can render on-screen. Messages can be targeted to specific regions using the cellular networks’ databases of phone subscribers’ preferred languages.

“With our technology, a message in any language can be sent to any mobile as long as it supports picture messaging,” says Vinjamuri Ravindra, an electrical engineer and R&D director with Geneva.

The multilingual messaging software is compatible with most types of cell phones used in Asia and is compact enough to be stored on a subscriber identity module (SIM) card. Full Article Via Technology Review