Terminologies Used In Localized Mobile Application For Supply Chain Management In Rural India Nagraj Emmadi IDC, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay
[email protected]
Anirudha Joshi IDC, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay
[email protected]
ABSTRACT
Nirav Malsattar IDC, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay
[email protected]
their scale, bringing in efficiency improvements, and other advantages associated with information technology. However, language of communication continues to be one of the barriers for such a transformation. In this paper, we focus on terminologies that used in business applications in the context of rural India.
The mobile phone penetration in rural India is high and network prices are low. Usage of smartphones in rural areas is rising. However, information technology in general, and smartphones in particular are not being used for business purposes. While there is scope for developing localised business applications for rural India, there are very few Indian language business application terminologies that are commonly understood. We designed and developed an Android based business application in Hindi to manage logistics in a rural enterprise involving wild apricot oil. After the application evaluation with 11 rural users, we discovered that some terms worked well, while others do not. We also investigated the reasons why this happens. The lessons learnt from our study could be applied in contexts of other business applications in similar contexts.
Business facilitators such as banking and transportation services have been around in urban India for about 200 years. Since the period of British rule, English has been the predominant language of communication for businesses in India. As a result, people involved with businesses in urban India have gotten used to terminologies such as “order”, “rate”, “post”, “shipment”, “delivery”, “registration” etc. Even people who have less education, and who otherwise do not speak in English (e.g. truck drivers and delivery personnel), tend to use many of these terms by transliterating them from English into their preferred languages. Thus, local language terms has not evolved for many business terminologies.
Author Keywords
Localisation; terminology; business applications; mobile applications; information technology; Indian language.
However, English is otherwise not the preferred language in day to day communication among common people. This is reflected in the penetration of traditional media. Less than 10% newspapers in circulation are English [5]. The proportion of English television viewing in India is believed to be about 3% [11]. English is certainly not an option for the business contexts in rural India, where the proportion of usage of English is even lower.
ACM Classification Keywords
H.5.2. Information Interfaces and Presentation: User Interfaces. INTRODUCTION
In rural India, there exists little use of information technology for business purposes. However, as the penetration of mobile telephony and smartphones expands [10], and as the cost of mobile hardware and connectivity falls, this could change quickly. Smartphones could become the catalysts in bringing about a transformation. People in rural India can potentially benefit by harnessing information technologies on their smartphones for business purposes. There is tremendous scope for developing applications for rural businesses and thereby increasing
Support for Indian languages is one of the issues. While a few smartphones do support a few Indian languages, universal support for all Indian languages is still not common. Even in devices that do offer Indian language support, only a few terminologies have been localised, and these are often confusing and sometimes not appropriate. Inappropriate terminologies could become a barrier in adoption of smartphone applications, and more generally information technology in rural areas. Therefore, there is a need to develop localised terminologies which are meaningful, usable, and consistent.
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We initially discuss the background literature about localisation. Then we describe the context of the problem statement, existing solutions, and our chosen solution. In the evaluation section we describe the process of
IHCI '14, December 07 - 09 2014, New Delhi, India Copyright 2014 ACM 978-1-4503-3218-7/14/12…$15.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2676702.2676706
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These trees are usually found at altitudes between 19,000 and 23,000 feet above the sea level. The wild apricots are seasonal and are easy to harvest. The fruits of these trees are not readily edible as the seed contains small amounts of cyanic acid. The pulp of the wild apricot fruit is used to make squashes and jams and is sometimes consumed by the locals of the region for chutneys. But usually, most of the wild apricots rot where they fall in the forest.
evaluation, the users, and the protocol. Finally we note the findings and end with a discussion. BACKGROUND
Literature in localisation typically focuses on issues such as text input and keystroke related analysis, having 30% extra space for characters from another language, localising all parts of the interface including help, tool tips etc., providing grammatically correct and complete sentences, and issues related to managing localisation projects [2, 3, 4, 6, 8].
CTD has developed technologies for extracting purified and usable wild apricot oil. The oil has medicinal value. It can also be used in various cosmetics. CTD is currently working towards developing commercial markets for the wild apricot oil, squashes etc. Initial response to these products has been encouraging. If the wild apricot oil gets a good market, then the production of wild apricot oil would be scaled up.
However, there is little published guidance for localisation beyond these issues. In 2010, Welankar et al [9] argued that there have been no attempts to identify “principles that one could use while translating and localising the user interfaces, particularly the text used in commands and labels”. In the intervening period, not much seems to have been added, and particularly so for Indian languages.
The current practice of procuring wild apricots is thus: When there is a requirement of the wild apricot seeds, an employee of CTD goes to the villages in the hills and talks to the people there to find out if any of them would want to sell the apricot seeds or fruit. When the person finds the right quantities of supply, he / she negotiates a price with the suppliers and a sale is made. The employee then arranges for transport. The process takes about a week, and considerable amount of effort. As production scales up, this practice is clearly unsustainable.
Welankar et al [9] identified six principles for translating the English terms to Marathi. They point out that noun-verb confusions are common in localised versions of interfaces. The same English term can be conveniently used either as a noun or as a verb without difficulty (e.g. “call”). However, this does not work for Indian languages, which require explicitly different terms for nouns and verbs. They further suggest that if the users are likely to be more familiar with English terms than their Marathi counterparts, there is no harm in retaining English terms by transliterating them. On the other hand, we should not use English terms that the users are unfamiliar with. Instead, we could create new terms that are culturally appropriate. They point out that metaphors and terms that sound “cool” in English may be particularly difficult to translate. On the other hand, they also warn against using very formal, heavily Sanskritised translations. They suggest that conversational terms must be used instead. They also argue for consistency of terminology across screens and in different situations. Katre [4] says that it is necessary to understand the grammatical differences between Hindi and English to design the content and display techniques. This can help in making the textual content more readable and understandable.
Going forward, CTD plans to appoint local mediators in clusters of villages to procure wild apricots. A typical mediator would be a local youth from one of the villages in the cluster having 10+ years of school education, and already engaged in an income generating activity that enables him to be in contact with a fair number of people from those villages (e.g. running a shop, delivering milk, driving a vehicle etc.). It would be the job of the mediator to keep track of “wild apricot farmers”. These would be any persons who are willing to collect wild apricots – for example those who have a fair number of wild apricot trees growing in their lands or near their homes. CTD would place orders on the mediators, who would in turn arrange for the produce from the farmers in the village cluster, aggregate it, transport it, collect payments from CTD, distribute the money to the farmers, and keep a commission in return of their efforts.
THE CONTEXT
In this section we describe the context of our work. A nongovernmental organization, Centre for Technology and Development (CTD) has been active in the state of Uttarakhand in North India for a few years. One of the objectives of CTD is to help scale up rural enterprises. It hopes to do so by using technologies (including information technology) that are specifically developed for rural areas. CTD expects that by developing and deploying these technologies, a larger proportion of value-creation activities could be moved to rural areas, thus allowing rural enterprises to scale and be sustainable.
CTD currently has a “mother unit” for wild apricot oil processing located in Dehradun, the capital city of Uttarakhand. CTD plans to set up four additional “satellite units” in the state so that some of the production (and value addition) is moved out to smaller centres closer to the villages, and thereby improving the efficiency. Each satellite unit would be geographically accessible to a cluster of villages, each with its own moderator. Each moderator is expected to manage operations of about 20 farmers.
One of the products that CTD deals with is non-edible oil, particularly wild apricot oil. Wild apricot trees are commonly available in the foothills of the Himalayas.
As wild apricots are seasonal (most of them growing in the months of June and July) the production operations would
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The Solution
peak during the season. Beyond the season, it is not easy to maintain an inventory of the unprocessed fruit in rural areas. However, the apricot kernel within the seed can be safely preserved for a few months after the season. Thus, if the local moderators or farmers were to do some value addition in terms of removal of the pulp, the season cycle could be potentially extended till November, when it starts getting too cold for transportation.
Once the operations are in full swing, CTD expects to work with up to 80 mediators and 1,600 farmers. This would require fairly large amount of tracking and coordination to manage the supply chain of the wild apricots, pulp, and seeds on a daily basis. To support CTD, we designed a web application for the satellite unit to place orders, track existing open orders, and view the closed orders, and a mobile application Hindi for the mediators to manage farmers, and to fulfil orders.
Existing Solutions
Much of information technology developed over the last few decades to support urban businesses, and as a result, several products have emerged. These products have been collectively called “enterprise resource planning” (ERP) tools. ERP systems usually consist of integrated applications used “to collect, store, manage and interpret data from many business activities”, such as product planning, costing and development, manufacturing or service delivery, marketing and sales, inventory management, and shipping and payment [1]. A thorough review of all such products is beyond the scope of this paper. However, here we present an example of some SAP products [7] as an illustration of how these might not suit our context.
Using the website, the satellite unit can place orders for the required amount of wild apricot kernel, seed, fruit or pulp. While filling out a new order, an employee fills out details like quantity, price, type (kernel, seed, fruit or pulp), and the delivery date required. Once the order is placed, all the mediators associated with the satellite unit receive a notification on their mobile applications. The mediator who reviews and confirms the order first, gets the order (see figure 1).
Though a majority of SAP products have been developed for large companies, SAP does have some products to support small businesses. e.g. SAP Ganges, Milk and SAP HANA, etc. SAP Ganges is meant for building network of retailers and connecting retailers, distributors and FMCGs to increase their sales. Milk and SAP HANA computes and forwards the payment details of milk producers to the bank and bank in turn transfers the money to their individual accounts directly. Both the products are aimed to ease the work of an organization or a business in terms of data collection, analysis and provide a better logistics to enhance their businesses. These applications are difficult to fit in our case as it is, because firstly they are not localized, they are not flexible enough to change as per the requirements of the CTD, they don’t fit in the website, mobile application and IVR kind of combined set up.
Figure 1. Confirming a new order.
SAP also have some products for the NGOs (Hitech Help for Haiti and ChariTra). Among these, Hitech Help for Haiti is primarily meant to help NGOs to ensure the funds donated are delivered efficiently and donators have full transparency. ChariTra is an online network for social causes, which enables non-profit organizations to post their needs and individuals or organizations who want to support a need can volunteer.
The mediator then assigns sub-order(s) to registered farmers (see figure 2). After the mediator assigns suborders, the corresponding farmers are called by an interactive voice response (IVR) system, and are intimated about the price, delivery date, and quantity, and are asked for a confirmation. Their feedback is sent to the mediator as well as the satellite unit. If a farmer cannot fulfil his suborder, the mediator may reassign it to another farmer.
Neither of these products are meant to help an NGO manage logistics of a supply chain with the help of a loosely structured setup of individual farmers, local mediators, and satellite units, none of which may be under direct control of the NGO. Further, these applications have not been localized for any of the Indian languages.
Once the mediator gets the material, he arranges for transporting the same to the satellite unit, collects the payments, and distributes it after deductions. Once the mediator has collected the payments, another IVR notification is sent to the corresponding farmers. Mediator
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can also view and register farmers (see figure 3) and track their inventories with his application.
While we evaluated the overall usability, here we focus on the findings related to the terminologies used in the application.
Figure 2. Assigning farmers to the order.
1.
आर्डर
Order
2.
पररवहन का तरीका
Mode of transport
3.
ककसान जोड़े
Add farmer
4.
पहुचने की तारीख
Date of arrival
5.
रद्द करें
Cancel
6.
पररवहन कीमत
Transport cost
7.
स्वीकृत
Accepted
8.
शिपमेंट वववरण
Shipment (transliterated) description
9.
डर्लीवरी
Delivery (transliterated)
10. संपकड वववरण
Contact details
11. मात्रा बताओ
Indicate quantity
12. भुगतान वववरण
Payment details
13. ककसान
Farmer
14. ककसान रजजस्रे िन
Farmer registration (transliterated)
15. हहसाब
Account
16. व्यजततगत जानकारी
17. दर 18. ककसान का चयन
Figure 3. Farmer Registration.
करें
Since the mobile application is supposed to be used in Uttarakhand, it was developed in Hindi. The terms used in the application were suggested by Hindi experts who were local to that area (Table 1). The terms seemed meaningful and understandable by urban Hindi speakers in Mumbai. However, we were not sure if these would be equally understandable in rural areas. The success of our solution is heavily dependent on whether or not the application proves to be usable by the mediators. Hence we conducted evaluations with the targeted users.
Personal information Rate Choose a farmer
19. मात्रा
Quantity
20. कुल आर्डर राशि
Total order amount
21. िेष मात्रा
Balance quantity
Table 1. List of Hindi terms used in the terminology test. The Users
With the help of CTD, we recruited 11 users who lived in villages in Uttarakhand. Though the mediators are expected to have 10+ years of school education, most of them would not have had much opportunity to use computers or the internet. While most of them would probably have a feature phone, many would not be familiar with a smartphone.
EVALUATION
We conducted an evaluation of the mobile application to identify problems with the current design. We evaluated the task success of the participants in the usability test.
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Their education ranged from 10 years of schooling to postgraduation. They were all native Hindi speakers. Some users knew how to type in Hindi using keypad phones. The average age was 28 years. Some users were unemployed, two of them were running a small photo studio, one of them had a stationary store and almost everyone had a small farm. All the users were males. Although we offered to recruit both male and female users, we could not recruit any females.
above, but this time no help was provided. Users were encouraged to complete the task without help. The hesitations and errors were recorded.
All the users had at least 3+ years of mobile usage on a personal (i.e. not shared) mobile phone. Two of the users had a touch-screen phone. Two more people had touchscreen phones earlier, but they don’t have it any more. (Their phones got damaged because water spilled on their phone accidentally or children dropped the phone while playing with it.) Interestingly, all the users knew about the touch screen phones even though they did not own one. Users knew about some of the uses of the smartphones like listening to music, downloading and watching videos, taking photos etc. but they had no hands on experience.
A majority of the terms in the terminology test were easily understood by the users and they could explain the meanings successfully. However, some terms were either not understood at all, or were found to be confusing.
FINDINGS
We focus here mainly on the findings related to the terminology test. We will also highlight some of the terminology problems that we discovered when the users did the tasks.
We had used three English business terms that we felt were common enough and hence transliterated them in Hindi without translating them. However, these were not understood or were misunderstood during the terminology test. Not a single user could explain the term 8 “शिपमेंट वववरण” (shipment details, where the word shipment was transliterated). However, no one could suggest alternatives for this term.
The Method
We conducted the test either in the village where the user lived or as near it as was possible, where mobile phone service range was available, so that the user could complete the tasks. On recruitment, we first explained to the user the objectives of the evaluation, the tasks, and what was expected from him. After taking a written informed consent, we collected the demographic information.
The term 9 “डर्शलवरी” (transliterated from delivery) was wrongly understood by some users as related to the delivery of a baby. Users suggested alternatives such as “सामान भेजना” or “माल भेजना”. The term 14 “ककसान रजजस्रे िन” (farmer registration, where the word registration was transliterated) was understood by some users, but was not preferred. For this term, users suggested many alternatives (“ककसान जोर्ना”, “ककसान का संग्रह करना”, “ककसान नामांकन”) but the one that was most commonly understood was “ककसान पंजीकरण”.
Before showing the users any device, we first did a terminology test. The users were presented with set of 21 Hindi terms used in the application one at a time in a random order (Table 1). The user was asked to speak the word aloud once and explain what he understood from it. His answers were recorded using a voice recorder and were also noted down. If the user could not understand a term, the moderators would explain it to him. The user was then asked to suggest an alternative term.
On the other hand, though the users could understand the term 17 “दर” (price or rate), they preferred using English transliteration for “rate” (“रे ट”) as this is commonly used in the markets. Even some terms in chaste Hindi were not clear to the users. For example, the term 6 “परीवहन कीमत” (transport cost) was one of the terms which was confusing for some users. For them it sounded like price of the vehicle. Some users confused it with the bus fare for local transport rather than the cost of hiring a goods vehicle for transportation. Users suggested a more conversational “गार्ी का भाड़ा” as an alternative.
After the terminology test the user was trained to use the application. This involved 3 steps: familiarizing the user with the touch screen phone by asking him to play a game (fruit ninja: where you slice the fruits.), giving the user a typing task using English or Hindi keyboard according to his preference, and familiarize the user with the actual tasks. We wanted to familiarize the user to smartphones using an unrelated task to avoid introducing bias, so we chose a game to do that. The tasks included locking / unlocking the phone, registering farmers and their details, looking up and accepting or rejecting a new order, assigning sub-orders to farmers, filling out shipment details, and closing the order.
Users could explain the term 3 “ककसान जोड़े” (add farmer, literally “attach farmer”) during the terminology test. However during the tasks, a few users got confused with the term. They understood the literal meaning of the word (similar to registering a new farmer) and not the contextual meaning (assigning a farmer to an order). Hence users did not click this button. They thought of their task was to “select farmers” and not “add farmers”. As an alternative,
After the training, a break was given and the evaluation was done in a second session. The break was a minimum of 2 hours, but in most cases, it was about 24 hours. In the second session, the users were given the same tasks as
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users suggested “ककसान चुनें” (select farmers) or “जुर्ा हुआ ककसान” (registered farmers).
Such terms need to be determined through field-based evaluations. In fact the same rule may also apply to Hindi terms.
During the test, the only task that was successfully completed by all the users was adding new farmer to the system. This task was linear and all the users could complete without much hesitation.
While we have documented a list of terms that actually work in rural Uttarakhand, other terms will have to be worked upon in future before the future of business automation in rural areas is realised.
On the other hand, the order page was particularly confusing. Even though the information was chunked in sections, users could not figure out what to do next. It seemed that there was too much information presented on a single page and the user needed to remember too many things. This confusion can be solved by making this order page linear and direct the user to do one job at a time.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This research was funded by the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India under the DST-RCUK Bridging the Urban Rural Divide (BURD) project, Scaling the Rural Enterprise number DST/SEED/INDOUK/003/2011.
It is pertinent to note that though all users could write fluently in Hindi, they found it difficult to type in Hindi. Almost all the users wanted to type in Hindi, but could not, because they could not figure out how to use the Hindi keyboard. Three users tried to type in Hindi. One was successful, but it took long time for him to complete the task. Two users gave up in between and switched to English. Surprisingly, more users could type in English than Hindi successfully.
REFERENCES
1. Enterprise Resource Planning: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_resource_planni ng 2. Gugnani, V., Arora, K., and Shukla, V. N. Issues & Challenges in Developing Multilingual Applications for Mobile: Indic Languages Perspective. In Proc.W3C Workshop on the Mobile Web in Developing Countries 2006.
One of the users suggested that it would be better if the digits were also in Hindi.
3. Joshi, A., Ganu, A., Chand, A., Parmar, V., and Mathur, G. Keylekh: a keyboard for text entry in indic scripts. Ext. Abstracts CHI 2004, ACM Press (2001), 928-942.
Users had some minor confusions related to the general usage of smartphones. Some users consistently tapped on the label and not the corresponding textboxes. One of the users could not understand that he has to tap on the checkbox to select the farmers in the list.
4. Katre, D. S. A position paper on crosscultural usability issues of bilingual (Hindi & English) mobile phones. In Indo-Danish HCI Research Symposium (2006),1-20. 5. List of newspapers in India: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_Ind ia_by_circulation
CONCLUSION
Mobile phone hardware and connectivity are rapidly becoming affordable and available in rural India. This has brought the benefits of information technologies within reach of these users. Business applications and tools for these users are expected to emerge shortly. However, usability in general, and specifically an emergence of appropriate terminologies in these languages could be a potential barrier in adoption.
6. Raghunathan, S., and Sugumaran, V. Predictive text entry model for natural language in mobile phones: The case of Tamil. 7. SAP products: http://www.sap-tv.com/ 8. Shanbhag, S., Rao, D., and Joshi, R. K. An intelligent multi-layered input scheme for phonetic scripts. In Proc. 2nd international symposium on Smart graphics 2002, ACM Press(2002), 35-38.
We conducted a terminology test and a usability evaluation of a business application targeted to users living in villages of Uttarakhand. We found that 16 out of 21 terms we had used were understood correctly as per their usage in the application, though 5 were not completely clear. Users prefer to use some terms transliterated from English, while others may need translation. On the other hand, a couple of Hindi terms were also found to be confusing.
9. Welankar, N., Joshi, A., and Kanitkar, K. Principles for simplifying translation of marathi terms in mobile phones. In proc. International conference on Interaction Design & International Development IHCI 2010. ACM Press (2010),11-18. 10. World Wide Annual Smartphone Sales by Gartner: http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2665715
While it has been known that one should only use English transliterated terms which are widely known to the targeted audience [9], we found that the language experts in urban areas may not be able to predict which English terms the users will be able to understand and which need translation.
11. Viewership of English Channel in India by language & genre: Source TAM | Market: All India| TG: All C&S 4: http://www.aidem.in/downloads/Indian%20Media%20S cenario.pdf
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