Sala Enterprises wins e-Swabhimani award

The Information and Communication Technology Agency national best e-content awards, e-Swabhimani Awards was held last week. Sala Enterprises emerged winners in the e-inclusion and participation category. Managing Director of Sala Enterprises, Chinthaka Wijewickrama said, “As Sri Lanka is a multi-cultural and multi lingual society we saw a great potential in developing and bridging the gap between languages by introducing the 'Language Companion'.”

“This unit has made a significant impact to many users in communicating with other races and bridging the communication barrier and bringing about national harmony. To minimise the hassle and expense, we introduced this compact, portable pocket-sized unit which speaks the preferred language with the correct pronunciation,” he said.

The Language Companion is a Sinhala, Tamil, English electronic trilingual dictionary. “This speaking dictionary can provide a platform for language learning. We have already added the over 70,000 Sinhala words to the Sinhala dictionary database and it carries the prestigious Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford Thesaurus and the popular Comet Tamil Dictionary”, he said. It has over one million translations from Sinhala to English and Tamil, Tamil to Sinhala and English and English to Sinhala and Tamil”, he said.

“The keyboard layout consists of the famous Wijesekera keyboard layout for Sinhala. The Tamil layout is of the Renganathan keyboard layout. The Language Companion keyboard has been designed according to the comfort of the users giving space between each key for easy typing. Keeping in mind visibility, the screen consists of a backlit panel. This unit comes with a zoom in function as well. Some of the other features are a full functional calculator, metric converter, scientific calculator and formulae in physics, chemistry and mathematics. To assist the user in pronunciation, a built in voice recorder has been incorporated.