Programmers have already worked out Armenian texts for cell phones. Although the text is only for Samsung model phones, however, programmers are working on new texts now. (The texts of cell phones that appeared in our market about nine years ago were only in Russian and English).
Sergey Avagyan and Henrik Sargsyan have taken this initiative and their workshop is situated in Abovyan city. They have already got orders of installing Armenian texts in Samsung model cell phones.
“We used to get a lot of orders to install Russian texts in cell phones and thought that it would be better to have the Armenian version too. Then we decided to create a program for Armenian texts. At that time we took a Samsung model phone and started working on that. We had heard that some people had tried to work out these kinds of programs for Siemens model phones but it was not so good. When we created the program, the first question that came up was whether it worked well or not”, says 33 years old Sergey Avagyan.
These two friends worked on this program for five months and created a program of installing Armenian texts in about 30 models of Samsung cell phones. After placing an announcement in a newspaper in Yerevan, five people visited them and asked to install this program in their phones. Sergey moved to Armenia with his family from Uzbekistan in 1989. He didn’t know Armenian before. He started to speak Armenian thanks to his wife after getting married five years ago. When Sergey turns on his phone, the greeting message that appears on the screen is in Armenian and says “Welcome to Abovyan”. When he moved to Armenia with his family he liked Abovyan very much and stayed there. All the terms of the phone are in Armenian. They have changed about 3000 sentences and 7000 words. They have created different programs for each model, because the principles are different for each of those models. The Armenian words are written in capital letters. The reason is that they couldn’t create three dictionaries at once for installing in this program. In four months they will finish creating a program for writing short messages (SMS) too. They are also going to create programs for Nokia and Siemens model phones: “We started this work for our own pleasure, but it would be better for us to get financial assistance and support to continue our program in order to install Armenian words in the system of mobile phones”, says Sergey. According to the law on language regulations, Armenian must serve in all fields of Armenia, and actually the absence of Armenian in cell phone texts is a violation of the law. The government doesn’t control this field to make people follow this law. These two men applied the law without being informed about it beforehand.
At first they applied to “Samsung” company to implement this program jointly and were told that first of all they didn’t have such a right and besides that their company didn’t want to provide financial support because Armenia is a small market for them. They have sent letters to the other cell phone producers too, but haven’t received any answers yet.
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