Aksharmaya-Testimonials

In 2004, Aksharmaya received its first important Microsoft assignment. Microsoft was bringing Microsoft Office 2003 in all major Indian languages. Product was already launched in Hindi and now it was the turn of Marathi, Gujarati & Konkani.

As part of Microsoft's "Project Bhasha", Aksharmaya was asked to review Microsoft Office Menus on screen.

Project involved Reviewing, Accepting, Rejecting existing list of words & forming new words. Words would be incorporated in Menus, Help & Error Messages in Microsoft Office 2003 Marathi, Gujarati & Konkani as well as in Windows XP Starter Edition.

We were very happy and brimming with self confidence in having secured our first IT Outsource project from MNC and that too from No.1 Software Maker of the World!

We worked on methodology & formed a committee of domain experts for each of the langauges.

How the entire Project was executed is a story by itself.

After the work of reviewing Microsoft Office 2003 Marathi, Gujarati & Konkani was completed, it was decided by Microsoft to ask established figures from different walks of life in Maharashtra their feedback on the product. They asked us to go and find out the reactions of people on the Product. Only condition was it had to be the real genuine reaction to Microsoft Office 2003 in Marathi, under no circumstances it would be a paid endorsement from Microsoft for the people who would give the testimonials for the product.

Getting a reaction of people involved making list of people from different fields, making first a standard form of questionnaire, requesting them to see the product & to specifically review Menus in Marathi, fill out the questionnaire & agree to allow us to publish the reviews.

Review would be in depth, about 2-3 hour session with us, focussed around scope of product's functionality, comparison with Microsoft Office English and giving reaction on whether the promise by Microsoft & Project Bhasha of bringing Indian user at par with International user was fulfilled through this work and whether Unicode based Localised Microsoft Office was the need of the hour for India.

As we started we realised it would be a comment on our work on Product as much as Microsoft's and we were not very sure how it would be received.

Aksharmaya team was truly overwhelmed by the response. We were simply not prepared for the warmth and the reaction. Not only people filled standard English questionnaire, they completely set aside the English Questionnaire framework that we had set ourselves and spoke their heart out.

We got the responses in written form, we got them in audiovisual form. People would simply agree to re-write in English and Marathi and shoot in bilingualspeak twice over, we got testimonials from the famed ones and not so famed ones. From Media personalities, from Domain Experts, Educationists, Editors, Teachers, State Govt Workers and some Public Sector Banks.

In the process, we collected more than 100 Testimonials. We are herewith presenting only selected 20.

Of course not all the 100% were in favour. There were some voices of dissent. But we are happy to say they were about 1%.

Here's the Curtain Raiser...