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standards and software for supporting proper usage of the Tatar language in
ICTs as one of the state languages ​of the Republic.
Fundamental research and development have been made in three major areas:
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1. introducing the Tatar language in cyberspace,
2. developing and adapting IT for Tatar,
3. using cognitive potential of the Tatar language for creating new
information technologies.
Introducing the Tatar Language in Cyberspace
This area of research and development is directly linked to the problem of
preserving the language, increasing its activity in the infocommunication
space, and facilitating the use of Tatar in cyberspace as a cognitive and
communicative tool, i.e. a means of information presentation, storage and
transmission. It is also essential for ensuring equal use of Tatar and Russian
as the official languages of the Republic of Tatarstan, and for enabling
native speakers’ direct communication with computer systems without any
intermediate language.
This area of ​work includes basic and full localizations of operation systems.
By now this task has been fully accomplished for the Cyrillic Tatar language.
Screen and keyboard drivers, printer drivers, and fonts have been designed
by the experts of the Academy of Sciences and the Kazan State University
and offered as standardized for use in information technology in Tatarstan.
On this basis, on December 9, 1996 the Cabinet of Ministers of the Republic
of Tatarstan adopted the Decree on the Tatar Characters’ Encoding Standard
for Computer Applications.
The Decree helped unify the device drivers which were initially created by
various groups and individuals and distributed to different computers, thus
fixing diverse layouts and leading to a “discrepancy.” Before the introduction
of a common standard, Tatar texts typed on one machine were incorrectly
displayed – if readable at all – on another. The unification of device drivers
has prevented chaos in recordkeeping.
Under the agreement with Microsoft, device drivers were developed and
brought to the Windows NT and MS Office 2000 in compliance with the
adopted standards. Currently, the TATWIN driver package, included in
the TatSoft 2 software package supporting Tatar, allows for recordkeeping
in Cyrillic Tatar in all Windows 95/98/2000/XP/Vista/7 applications, as
well as for websurfing. The Microsoft website contains relevant information