National Language Authority - Key Activities

Key Activities

The institution has published a wide range of general, scientific and technical dictionaries and an Urdu Thesaurus. Especially, the Qaumi English-Urdu Dictionary has been based on Webster's Dictionary. A vast amount of literature has also been produced to encourage reading habits among children.

In 1980, the Authority standardised the Urdu keyboard layout for typewriters based on Naskh script. Later on, with the arrival of the digital age, the layout was improved for teleprinters and Information processing. Subsequently, in 1998 efforts were initiated to standardize Urdu encoding, which resulted in the formation of Urdu Zabta Takhti (اردو ضابطہ تختی) (UZT). This development was inline with the efforts to cope with the emerging demands of Urdu applications from word processing to mega-scale projects such as Computerised National Identity Cards by NADRA and a number of E-Governance initiatives by the national government. In July 2000, UZT 1.01 was standardised for all kinds of electronic computing, communications, and storage. Based on this version, Urdu language support was incorporated into the Versions 3.1 and 4.0 of Unicode. Localization of Microsoft applications like Windows and Office in Urdu is also done by then NLA, now NLPD.

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