First of its kind

Tally 8.1, the breakthrough business accounting and inventory management software from Tally Solutions, is the successor to the VAT compliant and highly successful Tally 7.2.

This leading-edge software solution supports the concurrent use of all Indian languages, on the data stored in the software. In fact, it is the world’s first business application to support concurrent or simultaneous use of all Indian languages.

Localization through Multi-Linguality

Multi-linguality is the need of the hour in today’s dynamic global marketplace. Localized software is no longer a luxury, but an absolute necessity.

The availability of multi-lingual information - whether marketing, technical or legal - is an indicator of a company's commitment to an international and culturally diversified audience. The transmission of clear, up-to-date messages in the user’s native language is a key contributor to business success, and therefore, a decisive factor in the purchase of software.

A closer look at the impact of localization on IT firms reveals just that. Thorough localization by itself is a winning differentiator, especially in highly competitive marketplaces characterized by high levels of intangibility, in terms of finished products or services.

For instance, in India, though the recognized number of languages and dialects runs into thousands, there is one common bridge (a purely commercial one) between a language and its social acceptability: employment & business operations.

English or Hinglish: What is the buzzword?

While people are steadily gravitating towards English as the official business language even in remote parts of the country, most Indians do not easily relent on using their vernacular mother-tongue, given an opportunity to do so.

Traditionally, several software application sectors have leveraged this linkage to their advantage. Such as the publishing industry, multimedia and learning & education applications, to name a few. Fundamental business automation, it is widely believed, is another area that is waiting to grow in leaps and bounds - backed by the power of multilingual applications.

Tally Solutions is looking to catalyse this belief into reality, attempting to assimilate more of this capability into products than any other player in the world.

The aim is to develop the ability to accept, store and display information (data as well as software menu or prompts) in multiple languages, and secondly, to allow effortless transliteration within a family of languages. And the net result? The user can interact with the software in any language of choice; enter and access data in another language, as well as instantly generate outputs of the same data using different scripts in other languages.

At present, India uses 11 uni-directional scripts (left to right and top to bottom) and Tally 8.1 supports all of them. Upon installation of Tally 8.1, a user can maintain accounts in Hindi and send invoices to customers in Baroda, in Gujarati. He can also issue purchase orders to suppliers in Kolkata in Bengali and to Chennai in Tamil; and generate delivery challans to transporters in Kannada, Telugu or Punjabi.

The usage flexibility resulting from this intrinsic concurrency is endless. And it is this seamless concurrency of multiple language support that is the biggest technological achievement and Tally 8.1’s unique claim to fame.

Coming Up Next

In the course of the next few months, Tally Solutions will strive to extend this unparalleled advantage to users across the world. By having successfully implemented the technological backend to be able to support different kinds of scripts – the language support extent is expected to grow in multiples. And the primary beneficiaries will be users in the corporation’s immediate market expansion radar --- Middle East, North Africa and the Asia Pacific.

The other aspect of multilingual capabilities that is often glossed over in the haste to arrive at the end result is the input device requirement. Tally 8.1 is able to support the normal English keyboard and its parallel use as a phonetic entry keyboard for Indian languages. This ensures a far higher level of intuitiveness and subsequently an easier learning process for entering information in regional languages.

For instance, a compound-letter like ‘Kri’ in Hindi which normally uses a combination-alphabet (Samyuktakshar) may have to be typed in as {K}{*}{R}{I}. Here the {*} stands for the half-consonant sign or the ‘hal’. However, in a transliterated phonetic keyboard input, it can actually be input as {K}{R}{I} and understood as the combination letter ‘Kri’.

While many have attempted to address the challenge of bridging a country as diverse like India through a single solution, Tally Solutions is aiming to ensure that its new mantra of “Anek bhasha, ek Tally” is resoundingly true for times to come.