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Why Linux Makes Sense for India
Why Linux Makes Sense for India
Falling costs have made computers more affordable to a larger section of India's population. At the same time, the Internet has made the PC a compelling proposition for fulfilling communications, education, entertainment and information needs. Based on these two trends, the market for Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) is likely to take off significantly in India.
Yet, India faces a peculiar problem in that almost all popular operating systems and applications packages are available only in English, a language which is spoken by a mere ten percent of the population. The lack of "Indianized" software is therefore an issue that seriously hampers the growth of the Indian computer industry. For almost 915 million Indians, the lack of Indian language interfaces is one among many issues that hamper their ability to reap the benefits of information technology. This is creating a new class of people who live in what can be called as "Information Poverty" even as technology becomes cheaper and cheaper.
At the infrastructure level, the barriers to information access are dropping dramatically with new ISPs coming into India and several players jockeying to provide bandwidth and other back-end services. However, without operating systems, applications and Internet content in Indian languages, key benefits of the digital revolution-e-commerce, low cost communication through e-mail, access to information databases, telemedicine services etc are denied to the Indian masses. Giving Internet access to an Indian who does not know a shred of English is like giving someone the keys to a car when there are no roads to drive on!
One development that can help India out of this deadlock is a national-level, collaborative effort to localise Linux to Indian languages.
Linux is a free operating system that has gained phenomenal popularity in recent times because it allows users to modify it to suit their own needs. Linux is a collaborative effort of thousands of programmers interacting over the Internet and is therefore not owned or controlled by any one company. In this article, we outline the economic and cultural imperatives for the localisation of Linux.
Free operating systems have several advantages for developing countries because most software packages today are developed in the west and then sold in developing countries where the parameters of affordability are completely different. The Bangladeshi activist Shahidul Alam expresses these differences poetically when he says, "A modem costs more than a cow." The benefits of free software multiply exponentially when we look at large-scale implementations. The Government of Mexico is estimated to have saved close to $125 million that would otherwise have been spent on proprietary systems when it signed up Red Hat to implement Linux in more than 140,000 schools and colleges across Mexico. In India too, large operators like World-Tel (which plans to have a thousand Internet Centres in Tamil Nadu, with each of them having between two to 20 PCs each) have expressed their intention to go the free software way. The company is negotiating similar deals with several other state governments. Organizations like World-Tel, Internet centres, schools and homes etc. can be expected to be significant users of Indian language operating systems.
The growth of content in platform-independent file formats (HTML, MP3 etc) has also reduced the dependence on a specific operating system, making Linux a viable option.
Apart from these, there are cultural reasons that make Linux attractive. The existing user interface paradigm of files and folders evolved because computers were essentially designed for a western audience familiar with real-life files and folders. There is no reason to assume why the same paradigm should apply to a trader in Tamil Nadu or a farmer in Madhya Pradesh.
The openness of Linux (and other free operating systems like Free BSD) allows local linguistic groups to customise user interfaces in ways that are far more culturally sensitive than any centrally controlled approach. Linguistic groups that may be considered too small a market by vendors can also take their destiny in their own hands by customising the Linux interface to their own needs.
It is therefore clear that Linux is a very attractive long-term solution to India's computing needs.
Localising the user interface of Linux to all the 18 official Indian languages will involve changing the menus and help-text to Indian languages and creating a whole stack of applications and tools (word processors, browsers, spell-checkers etc.) to enable computing in Indian languages.
This is a task that involves both technical and linguistic challenges. For example, should "File" simple be called "File" but written in Indian scripts because it is now a part of popular usage? Or should we find Indian language equivalents? In some cases it makes little sense. For example, how many people know that the Hindi word for computer is "sanghanak"? Or what is the Hindi equivalent for "Internet"? A very sensitive balance has to be struck between practicality and preserving Indian languages. However, Indian linguistic groups will have to wake up to the fact that their languages will become outdated if they do not become a part of the digital age. In fact, the Internet can be one of the finest means of recording, archiving and propagating Indian culture. Since culture is embedded in language to a significant degree, the ability to compute in one's native language can give Indian culture a significant boost.
However, one of the greatest roadblocks to computing in Indian languages has been the lack of widely accepted standards. If millions of people are able to freely e-mail each other, it is because of a widely accepted standard called ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange). It is sad that in spite of claims that India is a software superpower, we cannot harness IT for the benefit our own nation's citizens and the greatest stumbling block is a lack of agreement on standards. Check out ten different Hindi newspapers on the Web to see for yourself. You'll end up downloading and installing ten different fonts that (in most cases) can be used for browsing that one site and nothing else. It is because of this reason that Hindi, despite being one of the largest spoken languages in the world, has a negligible presence on the Web. Informed sources feel that the Unicode standard (which Microsoft has adopted for the upcoming Windows 2000 operating system) will soon become the de-facto standard settling the language standards issue once and for all. If this prediction comes to pass, it will significantly increase the domestic market for hardware, software and services, which is restricted only to a small fraction of India's population that understands English.
There are several initiatives that are underway in order to make this possible. The National Centre for Software Technology has submitted a proposal to the Technology Development in Indian Languages of the Government of India. TheIndian Institute of Technology, Madras has already started work on localising Linux to Malayalam and Tamil. My own institute, the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore has committed resources to this the "IndLinux" project and started a collaborative effort to realise this goal. IndLinux has attracted the interest of organizations like FreeOS.com and many individuals located around the world.
In conclusion, it has to be said that the Indianisation of Linux is probably one of the most practical ways of making information technology available to millions and millions of Indians. It is now upto linguistic and technical groups to collaborate and make things happen.
-0-
Prof. Venkatesh Hariharan is with the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore. He can be reached at venky@iiitb.ac.in.
now that the hindus believe in free will, and open source, the muslims will have to use microsoft, because they believe in one god, and one operating system.
On the other hand, a magician would have a virtual bag of holding :)
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
It's a little surprising that the Professor suggests that the file/folder metaphor is alien to Indian culture, given that India is reputed to have the world's most impenetrable democracy, cursed by endless red tape and form-filling. (That certainly was the case when I was there some years ago!)
But that's slightly beside the point: English has always been important as a unifying factor within the Indian nation, given the huge cultural and linguistic variations across the states. It's also meant that Indian programmers have been responsible for some highly significant work: whatever you think of MS, a glance at their credits list gives away the fact that a fair number of their developers come from the sub-continent.
What's important now is to gain leverage from this state of affairs: perhaps it would be useful for the big Linux vendors to start recruiting bilingual programmers to push on the development process. It should be a case of "English AND local language" rather than a XOR.
It isn't that difficult to learn enough English to be able to use English software. Instead, using computers and of course, the Internet, is a great way to learn English. Not knowing English means most of the content on the web is totally useless to you. Also, any non-english content on the web is totally useless for anyone who doesn't speak that specific language.
So, while I think it's vital that people can use their own languages so that they survive, you need to speak English to communicate with the rest of the world.
Please alter my pants as fashion dictates.
When it comes to bi-directional web-browsing, have you checked out Mozilla? There seems to be some work on bi-directional text, but I don't know if/how it's working. Maybe you should get in touch with them, and maybe offer them your help?
Please alter my pants as fashion dictates.
Apple's Mac OS 9 has full support at no cost for Devanagari, Gurmukhi, Gujarti, as well as Unicode, 8-bit characters, Chinese (traditional and simplified), Korean, Japanese, Hebrew, Arabic and Cyrillic language systems. You merely need to locate the installer on the OS 9 system disk.
This, however, is only the first step: applications need localization, too.
Wordnik, a dictionary project which aims to collect
What, in the name of God or whoever's in charge, do you people think is happening in Japan and China? Do you actually think users or even programmers there are all learning English? They're using their mother tongues! Chinese in all of its variations! Japanese! They even play games in those foreign languges. It's happening all over the world.
It will be the same in India. You need only port the system, apps and manuals. Programmers will do and learn what they have to to master their trade.
Indians do not need to learn English. They may not even need to learn to use computers. But once they use the new machines, they'll begin creating their own content, the same way all non-English-speaking nations have. Just seven short years ago it was impossible to find more than a handful of pages in any but a few Romance languages. Now look at it. Have you people visited, say, http://kr.yahoo.com/, lately? Or http://www.wanado.fr/?
Teaching English to the the poor and powerless is a mistake. I visited Ecuador a couple of years ago. One of my acquaintances there ran a program in a school for homeless children, teaching them English. They couldn't read. Couldn't do written math. They had little clothing. They worked from sun-up to sun-down scrambling to shine shoes. And they had no homes. What use is English to them, except to talk to condescending tourists? Wouldn't that money and time have been better spent on permanent homes?
Wordnik, a dictionary project which aims to collect
Cows are not sacred to all of India, kid. Only certain religions.
Wordnik, a dictionary project which aims to collect
They need to learn to read, not speak English.
They need to learn to do written math, not speak English.
English is not the only answer. It may not even by AN answer.
[Regarding programming in other than English: programmers are learning English only to program, not to create "an open flow of English." They're certainly not learning it merely to browse the web.]
Wordnik, a dictionary project which aims to collect
Alright, the Indian population is estimated at close to a billion people. But this does not constitute a potential market of a billion people.
For starters, lets look at the literacy rate. Slightly more than the 50% of the Indian population are literate. where the Indian government defines being literate as the ability to read and write a letter.
Now lets look at affordability. About 30% of the people live around or below the poverty line - which is a hand-to-mouth existence. For such people, the basic necessities of life like food, clothing, and shelter are more of a priority than being able to surf the web.
And what about the infrastructure? Telecommunication quality in India sucks when compared to western standards. While I have never used a modem in India, I would not be surprised to hear that 28.8K speeds are the upper limit of what can be achieved over normal phone lines. High speed access is mostly a dream. The top-end educational and research institutes (one of which is where the good professor is located) do have high speed access - but we are talking about the common man - not the engineers who earn 10 times what the common man makes.
And last, but not least, lets look at the languages. The Sahitya Academy (the premier institute in India dealing with Indian literature) considers 21 languages worthy of study. These many language constitute a divisive force in getting things to work. It would be far better to improve the standard of education in English, since the people who cant afford to learn English would probably be the same people who cant afford to use the web.
In other words, while Prof. Hariharan may be right about free OS'es being most-suited for India (mainly due to economic reasons), it is wrong to think that it means a huge increase in the free-software community.
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
Apart from these, there are cultural reasons that make Linux attractive. The existing user interface paradigm of files and folders evolved because computers were essentially designed for a western audience familiar with real-life files and folders. There is no reason to assume why the same paradigm should apply to a trader in Tamil Nadu or a farmer in Madhya Pradesh.
Interesting that the author brings this up. I was recently reading about a very specific form of brain damage, caused by an operation to remove a tumor from the brain. A very small but highly focused amount of damage was done to a patient's language system:
He could name people.
He could name objects.
He could name cities.
He couldn't name a living animal. He would consistently mix up dog, cat, and any other term belonging to the family of "living animal".
If there's one thing linguists have found, it's that the core roots of language are not cultural--they're genetic. The base objects of communications--nouns, verbs, and so on--are by no means the only theoretical communication paradigms, but they're shared by every non-artificial human language.
You might wonder why I bring this up: In designing a method for interacting between a human and a computer, the properties of language are indeed important for establishing relationships. While there may not be literal files and literal folders in Indian culture, the concept of items existing within the branches of a tree is engrained deep within the structure of the human brain.
Now, "File" and "Folder" themselves are western analogies, to be sure. But there's a difference between recontextualizing an idiom and dismissing a natural paradigm.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
I'm afraid I'm not very familiar with internationalization issues with Linux.. how well established is Unicode and localization support on Linux? Are there web pages dedicated to it? How does one find out?
I know Java has support for internationalization and localization (Unicode + a system for using resource files for messages), but it still depends on having national fonts on the system it is installed on. Do any of the JDK ports for Linux come with a full set of Unicode fonts for XFree86? Does XFree86 itself have Unicode support?
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
PC's are cheaper than televisions.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Yes, but Indians are so frightfilly clever. Much smarter than us Americans, which is why we have to import Indian software engineers. Last I checked, NASA was 80% Indian or Chinese.
I think it's those superior Communist math textbooks that do it.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Turbolinux, OTOH, has done a superb job localising Linux into Japanese and Simplified Chinese. Even bloody fdisk is in Chinese (If you can imagine!)
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Sounds great. Lower all those stupid trade barriers, and all of India will know the pride of working in a foreign-owned factory! Progress and prosperity HERE WE COME!
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
S'true. Win2K absolutely rocks with regard to language support. I have my entire mp3 collection labelled in the character set of each song's country of origin, and they all list correctly together on the command line
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
I propose the Lakshmi file system. The root could be a "god" (your choice), and each subdirectory could be one of many "arms".
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Actually, if you internationalize computing and the Internet, one of the things you're doing is playing into the hands of nationalists. The Internet is a superb melting pot for all nationalities, but the reason for its success in this role is that the use of English removes the primary barriers separating people. You can see it daily on the national-language forums: they're nowhere near as free from nationalist tension as the ones that use English, which are truly international. (Try IRC.)
I love languages and I'm a great advocate of multi-linguism for everyone. Sharing a language brings people together so that the more languages people are taught in school or learn later on, the better they tend to get on with each other (unless politics has got to them first). Furthermore, the use of English on the Internet is a strong lever in the same direction of broad social understanding and cohesion.
In contrast, the "internationalization" of computing systems is a complete misnomer: it's really nationalizing them, in the original sense of the term, ie. giving them a national orientation. Of course one might argue that it helps those that know only the national language and no other, but that's precisely the point: they no longer need to gain an international viewpoint once that has been done. And that's not to mention the dark side, namely the benefit to those that seek advantage from nationalism, ie. the politicians and puppet masters.
This "internationalization" bandwagon is unstoppable, but alas it has disadvantages as well as the more obvious advantages. And don't believe that the promoters (I'm talking about politicians here) are all altruistic. Pigs don't fly, not even abroad.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Indeed, and it's being won by a bunch of people I have no common language with.. Inside 10 years, only speaking english is probably going to make it extreamly hard to stay current.. Visions of a Snowcrashed west, this is the way.. The rest of the world could just leave our close-source-whoring asses behind..
What if World Domination(tm)'s happened by the time that situation comes around and Linux *is* the popular pressure?
Having recently had the experience of having to teach my mom Windows, I can fully tell you it's only easy if you already understand computers. All operating systems are equally hard when you're starting out (except maybe MacOS), so why not get 'em on the good stuff right away?
Also, because source is available to 99% of Linux apps, they're easily internationalized by Indian hackers and distros. Try that with Winamp or mIRC. KDE has a very nice internationalization framework in place, and console apps can use GNU gettext. Because Linux apps are often developed by non-US people, they tend to better address i18n issues than the Windows equivalents.
China (slashdot story), Mexico (slashdot story), India... those are significant populations. It's a step in the right direction.
Remove language barriers: internationalize all parts of Linux.
Remove affordability barriers: release up-to-date packages that are designed to be useable on old 386 systems. In a lot of countries, Pentium are unaffordium.
Remove barriers to access: donate your old hardware to third-world countries. Help get Linux distributed -- donate a diskette-set to an emerging-world school.
Remove application barriers: internationalize applications. Identify what old software (running on DOS, Commodore, other old iron) should be ported to Linux.
Support the world outside of the little space you inhabit. Think outside the USA, think outside white Europe. Most of the world isn't like you. Look after them, and it'll pay back a hundredfold...
--
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Call me cynical, but what's going to happen once their economy develops more? Once they have the money to afford more "standard" solutions like Windows NT and company... will they switch (bowing to popular pressure), or will they stay with the linux solution? Even more important, what's going to happen to all these indians (not american ones!) who have all this linux expertise if/when linux is accepted in the marketplace on a wide-scale?
You yourself called it a hierarchical tree. How about replacing file/folder with leaf/branch?
Steven E. Ehrbar
> This brings up a good point: do you
:)
> internationalize the source code?
Isn't i18n the process of designing programs to support several languages and currency/time/decimal notations and i10n the process of actually making changes for a specific language?
And I don't think code really should be localized. Coders will probably have to understand English to read documentation they need anyway and your average non English-speaking end user probably won't look at the code. I18n and l10n of programs and documentation is of much wider use at laest at the moment. Of course one could develop a translation engine that only translated the comments in source files
Oh. I would recommend that everyone started localization on documents about localization. That way as many people as possible can help.
-Late
First of all, the accepted term for translating a program's text and other conventions is 'localisation' - technically, internationalisation is the process of ensuring that software is very easily localised.
More importantly, why do so many people think that they should have the choice of using the Internet in their native language (which I'd guess is English for many people with this view), but that other people should not? Why don't you all learn written Chinese so *you* can benefit from an international outlook.
Just because English happens to be the language most used on the Internet does not mean that everyone should be forced to use it. In fact, I think it would do a lot of good to some anglophones to have to use another language occasionally.
On a practical note - for any Linux users who want a nicely internationalised + localised distribution - check out Mandrake 6.1 or later (7.0 is now downloadable). This has a great default setup that includes all the fonts required to surf to Japanese, Chinese, Korean and other sites using my normal Netscape 4.7 (English version). Even though I only know a few Chinese characters, it's great to at least be able to see the page and maybe send it to a friend who can read it (as an image attachment, no doubt...).
Mozilla (http://mozilla.org) has a great page on i18n and l10n, with some good resources.
Check your facts before posting - most US modems work fine in the UK and other countries once you set them to blind dial (AT X3, i.e. ignore dialtone). They may have difficulty detecting engaged tones as well but this is not too important for hearing modem users.
The important issue is power supplies, which are always different (but a 110-240V supply will do fine, and suitable local adapters can usually be found), and telephone socket standards (there are literally tens of different ones... See http://www.teleadapt.com/ for examples).
Internal modems, probably ISA, are the best bet. As for the other hardware, any PC is better than none IMO - a 386 or above would be fine for browsing the Net with Lynx, or doing email, which is the key app for many people. However, a 486 or Pentium would be able to support a GUI better, allowing better internationalisation support normally.
Many better-educated Indians do speak English and thus have access to the rest of the Internet. But why is it necessary for (say) a grandmother to learn English just to send email to her grandchildren? Learning English is a good thing for many people, but it's not an either/or - many people will learn English, many other people will use localised interfaces.
If SuSE can't manage to remove all the german from their distribution and it's manuals (and let's be honest - they can't), how much chance does anybody have of translating everything into Indian?
We don't have to. The Indians can. They just need some support and coordination with the people who control the relevant code, such as glibc, mozilla, gnome, KDE, and so on. Making sure the language has a language code, that bidi-capable text widgets are used, and so on.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Yes, but perhaps Linux could become that "easier path". India has a tremendous amount of intellectual capital and not much money. Linux could be a dream come true for them. The dev tools for building end user apps are already there ( namely, GNOME/GTK and KDE/QT ), and the Indian hackers have something that they can beat into shape. Perhaps beating Linux is easier for them in the long run than paying Windows licensing fees.
Linux might not be ready for home users yet, but perhaps it can start by taking the government desktops and the server market by storm.
english != american english != indian english etc etc
http://www.linux-india.org/
-- God is silent. Now if we can only get Man to shut up.
English enjoys associate status but is the most important language for national, political, and commercial communication, Hindi the national language and primary tongue of 30% of the people, Bengali (official), Telugu (official), Marathi (official), Tamil (official), Urdu (official), Gujarati (official), Malayalam (official), Kannada (official), Oriya (official), Punjabi (official), Assamese (official), Kashmiri (official), Sindhi (official), Sanskrit (official), Hindustani (a popular variant of Hindi/Urdu spoken widely throughout northern India)
note: 24 languages each spoken by a million or more persons; numerous other languages and dialects, for the most part mutually unintelligible
Think about that. Twenty-four mutually-unintelligible languages in common use. English has become the standard language for all but local purposes in India, because there are far too many local tounges to try to translate between them.
Professor Hariharan's article states that only 10% of Indians speak English. According to the factbook, only 52% of Indians are literate, in any language. Assuming that the English speakers are a subset of the literate people, that means that roughly 20% of the literate population can understand English. That's the same as the percentage of Indians who speak the most common non-English language, Hindi.
It seems to me that what India needs is more literacy, and more English speakers. English has, for better or worse, become the most common language in international trade. (And, in India's case, intranational trade.)
I would certainly applaud the efforts of any people who choose to localize Linux, or any other software, to Indian languages. I do not think, however, that placing Indian computer users into a localized ghetto, separate from the rest of India and the rest of the world, will prove to be the means that the "digital revolution" will be brought to that country.
This is especially the case if, as Professor Hariharan implies, an Indian-localized system would remove such commonly-used concepts as "files" and "folders". Does he envision a system based on "mud huts" and "clay slabs"? (And would any intelligent Indian react with anything other than offense to such a translation which assumes he is not intelligent enough to understand the original system?) Or does he rather imagine replacing the entire concept of a hierarchical directory structure with something else? If the latter, what possible purpose is served by making the systems used by Indians radically different than those used by the remainder of the world?
While this article makes a valid point in that more localized versions of Linux (or any software!) is a good thing, I feel that it far overstates its case and misses the point.
-Damien
A knowledge of Latin used to be mandatory for educated Europeans and Americans. It was the lingua franca of its day. It is still useful for some professions. German had a similar standing in chemistry.
The reality is that you need to be able to communicate with people in other countries. Today, the most useful language is English. Tomorrow, who knows. Don't confuse practicality with colonialism.
Many of my coworkers are Chinese, Indian, Korean and Vietnamese. Their only common language is English.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
all poor people are lazy and deserve to be killed
That's a disgusting overgeneralization. I have certainly advocated wounding the poor on more than one occasion, but never killing them . . . unless they're driving slowly in the left lane, of course, but that's a capital crime when anybody does it.
Nice troll, by the way. Not bad at all. It took me a minute to grok.
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." --
Now, this has nothing to do with whether or not german->english is harder than english->one of 18 indian languages, but that there is a fsck load of stuff to translate, and it'll be quite a project. Even then, there will more than likely be remnants of the english documentation.
On the other hand, India has a huge population, probably bigger than the US and Europe combined (but I don't know the population of Europe, so I might have just shoved my foot down my throat), which would mean they have plenty of people to support their own Open Source culture, but that doesn't mean we can't all help each other ;). So, it is a big project, but they have the man power. What we need to do is make sure our apps are translation friendly.
Jeff
How many different languages are spoken in India? Is it more? How prolific are the differnt languages? And what happens when you get a native language operating system out to a population who than can then understand less than 1% of all web content. Sure, there are a lot of purty graphics, but it's the text, man! I guess the question applies to more than just India, but all non-English speaking countries trying to break in to the Internet.
Maybe someone could develop a "Learn English for Web Browsing" site in multiple languages... but then again after taking years of Spanish in high school and college (which I promptly forgot) I don't think I could learn it from a web site.
Ah, screw it, lets just internationalize the stuff and see what happens. Worst case scenario: using their new found informational power India takes over the world (and the web) and I can't understand any of the content... :)
Got a web site? Want to know if it's up? Try @watch for free!
Windoze is only easier to use if you're used to it. I heard my girlfriend's 11 year old daughter tell one of her friends that "windows sucks...linux is way better" and her 5 year old has no trouble logging in to play games and fool around. The truth of it is, Microsoft is only intuitive to those who have used it for years and expect things to be in certain places. My father had a hell of a time going from win311 to win95 because there were too many ways to do the same thing and nothing really analogous to the program manager with all his programs laid out in front of him. He still refuses to use the start menu. Mexico will produce millions of children who find Linux as intuitive as American kids find Windows. And, with all good fortune, so will India and China. You think some of those kids will be the next Alan Cox or Linux Torvalds or Larry Wall? I bet they will.
In Soviet Russia, hot grits put YOU down THEIR pants.
I think you're absolutely right. I've seen chinese versions of windows, all seems to be integrated very well.
and with win2000 and office 2000, you can even do all this with an ordinary English version of windows. i checked it out, my girlfriend (who is chinese) could finally write chinese on my computer WITHOUT those icky addon programs she needed before.
In Linux, there is still a far way to go. OK, for example, if you use (X)Emacs with MULE and LaTeX, you can also write foreign language texts rather easy. But the rest? Especially if it's about multibyte character sets i'd guess it's a total mess.
--- thomas m., inter one networking group
How to combat this?
What I meant was not the current language issue, but that Linux, with the speed of improvement, etc. would catch up fairly quickly & overtake.
And yes, I am on crack.
Hahahohohehe HinduFS, BTW.
Kiran Jonnalagadda
-- Kiran Jonnalagadda http://www.pobox.com/~jace
My passport dated September 1992 is all English. I'm Indian.
Kiran Jonnalagadda
-- Kiran Jonnalagadda http://www.pobox.com/~jace
Wonder why English is still the only language I can speak...
Kiran Jonnalagadda
-- Kiran Jonnalagadda http://www.pobox.com/~jace
Computer magazines have been taking the initiative where vendors haven't. PC Quest has been carrying Linux on a cover CD once every year since 1996 (Slackware the first two years, RH since). CHIP Magazine (where I work) put RH 6.0 on it's August 99 CD with an eight-page article on installing and the first few steps. PC World has Corel Linux on the current issue's CD. All major magazines here come with monthly cover CDs. It's how we make up for lack of bandwidth to download individually.
Kiran Jonnalagadda
-- Kiran Jonnalagadda http://www.pobox.com/~jace
Women get burnt? Where? Certainly not here. Sati was abolished in the 1700s.
Kiran Jonnalagadda
-- Kiran Jonnalagadda http://www.pobox.com/~jace
Don't you think the US (and every other 1st world) country should also take care of their poor, the hungry, the homeless, the high crime rate in particular areas, the victims of racism, sexism (pay inequity for women), homophobia, those unable to afford a university or college education despite their opportunities, the arms race with China, etc... instead of wasting resources on wiring the nation to make Net access ubiquitous or providing 500 TV channels?
There are problems at all levels of society that need to be addressed simultaneously. You don't just ignore group A to help group B, just because group A has their essential needs met.
Furthermore, better IT access enables the economy to grow. The taxes collected during a growing economy can be used to address the problems you mentioned.
While it is important that Indian programmers learn English and become computer literate (most Indian programmers are, by the way), it is not at all essential for all Linux users in India to be English literate.
When Linux is embedded in kiosks and handhelds with handwriting input, the user is not really "using Linux" or "computing" - they are just communicating. While the language used to print assembly docs for the Boeing 737 are in English, a large proportion of the people flying Indian Airlines' 737's are neither airplane mechanics nor
aeronautical engineers.
Yes, the Information Economy is where it's at - however it is not necessary for the whole population to be "computer literate" to be "computer users" and gain the benefits of the Information Economy.
The last farmer in India will be "computer literate" about the same time that the last homeless person on the streets of San Francisco becomes computer literate. In other words there will be (for a long time) people at the other end of the Information continuum that will not get immediate benefits.
It is a common mistake in reasoning (often seen on Slashdot and other forums) to assume all Linux users are or need to be programmers. An ATM user uses computers and is part of the Information Economy without necessarily being a computer programmer or even what we call a "computer user"
In fact the future success of Linux and of computing lies in making it ubiquitous so that people everywhere use it and it works and they don't want or need to know what lies underneath.
Only a small fraction of the population needs to understand English, computer programming and Linux before Linux is everywhere. So let's focus on achievable goals closer to reality than to keep putting out the absurd requirement that 900+ million people in India need to learn English first before they are able to get the benefits of Linux.
I would be quite impressed if the 200+ million people in the US all learned English and computer programming and yet a good proportion of them are beneficiaries of the Information Economy.
Nitin Borwankar,
CEO and President,
Borwankar Research Inc.
The more idiot-proof you make it the smarter the idiots get.
I don't know what's their status right now,
but it's worth looking into it.
http://www.li18nux.org/
whats he trying to conclude ?
(I'm an Indian student working on my PhD at USC.)
As it turns out, almost the entire technically literate population of India knows/converses in English, with varying levels of proficiency, of course.
If you know something about India, you'd probably have heard that we have like hundreds of languages spoken all over India (18 are official). For that reason, English has for some time been the language for inter-regional communication.
Unfortunately, we have a major illiteracy problem in the regional languages themselves to aggressively promote English too. ie, our priority is to have most of the population literate first in the regional language (ie the language prevelant in the region they stay in), and then move on to promoting English.
As a result, in the urban areas, English is taught right from kindergarten; in semi-urban areas, English is taught from Grade 6 upwards, and of course rural areas don't do English at all.
I really doubt if this has happened as a result of goverment policy, but that is the situation now. I, coming from this background, am pretty comfortable with this; especially since government rules mandate that the entry to technical schools will not be related to demonstrable profiency in English, but the same will be the language of higer education (in most cases). This way, a person from a different background gets a chance to learn English after getting through the (very tough!) entrance examinations.
Coming to Internet; in India it's still an urban phenomenon. However, there is lots of scope for computer deployment in semi-urban and rural areas; not for surfing the net, but for infrastructure, just like here in the US. The hitch, obviously, is that the very areas that are most useful in terms of computerization are the ones that have the least English proficiency.
Hence the need of language distributions of Linux. Its absence will be a major deterrant in its deployment in the field (as opposed to in the urban areas, where it already has significant presence)
Finally, an off-topic point. Even MS Windows doesn't really have very good support for indian languages, even if it is available. (Compare Chinese/Korean/Japanese...) This funny fact is due to the aforesaid reality: computer deployment (not even talking about internet here) has traditionally been in areas where a significant computer-handling population knows English: a situation quite unlike any other country (Compare China/Korea/Japan).
Hence, never has there been a strong motivation for any major company to develop language OS/software for India: we don't care, we'll use the English version .
In Sum: if Linux does provide good support for the regional languages, combined with the fact that it's so cost-effective, it'll be lapped up by the government/NGOs like anything. This will be good both for India AND Linux: imagine the numbers!
About 5 years ago I was trekking in Himachal Pradesh -- one of the bits of india up near the himalayas. I was surprised to see that some of the small villages (just a few muddy huts) had a satellite dish like the one on the death star....
Moral: Even if you live in the indian himalayas your kids'll still be able to skip school and watch jerry springer at a friends house.
+++++
+++++
The harder you look the less you see. That's what we're up against.
I don't seem to recall the collapse of France in WWI. Perhaps you are referring to France's graceless capitulation in WWII, and their slavish bootlicking of the Nazi overlord?
Would US modems even *work* in India? Or are telcos standardized, these days?
On the contrary, Windows only seems a lot easier to use when it's what you started with. I didn't start with Windows and I find it nasty and repellant (I used VMS, Apollo Domain, Mac and various 8-bit microcomputers before I ever touched Windows). I think starting with systems built for reliability, power and openness first will innoculate the average Indian against thinking Windows is the "One, True Way".
Um, what do think is going to fix that? Government propoganda, or selling out their resources to western interests? What the hell do think "telecom infrastructures" are for if not economic development?
Linux helps unindustrialized countries develop their own infrastracture, without going into debt to foreign corporations.
(And geez man, get an education. You seem to think India is some big shanty town. It's the largest democracy in the world and its software industry is huge, probably second to the US).
I'm sorry but your posting shows nothing more
than the traditional american fear of anything
slightly resembling socialism.
The nordic contries are examples of market
economies influenced by socialist thought.
Are these countries worse off?
I don't think so.
The economy is great, crime is low, people
are generally happy.
I'm sorry, but stating that all economies influenced by socialism is worse off shows
nothing but ignorance.
Communism doesn't work, we all know that.
It doesn't give people enough motivation to
do their job well enough (Why work hard if I don't
get paid more anyway?).
But _Pure_ captitalist market economies, doesn't
seem all that fantastic either.
It breeds poverty, which in turn breeds crime.
Perhaps it is time to throw off all the fear of
not being able to become stinking rich (which most people with the dream, never will), for
something in between.
Taking care of people of all kinds of social-status, but still making it possible to achieve
something IS possible.
When I did O-level Computer Studies many, many years ago (it's a UK education thing, okay?) in Wales, we actually looked at a Welsh programming language. All the keywords in Welsh. Very, very bizarre.
Anyone else remember BASEG? Or the Welsh version of CESIL?
ben_ the technologist and platform agnostic
dead-lock, n (1779) 1: a state of inaction or neutralization resulting from the opposition of equally powerful uncompromising persons or factions : STANDSTILL 2: a tie score
--Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary
so if you want to talk about English, shut up and buy a dictionary.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
You are of course correct, the word "deadlock" has been in use for over 200 years.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
is "tao" pronounced with a t sound or a d sound?
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Given the recent change in the editorial board of India Today, it is not surprising that socialism gets a little bashed. The editor is Prabhu Chawla, a registered member of the currently-in-power Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) which the non-Indian press loves to refer to as a right-wing Hindu nationalist party. The second-in-command is Swapan Dasgupta (I think) who is also apparently a well-known right-wing sympathizer. India Today is not exactly in love with socialism or Marxism (not that I am either) and probably has its own agenda.
I will agree with your point though that Marxism is fashionable in certain academic circles. But it's not socialism, Marxism or democracy that's the cause for India's woes. It's corruption, ignorance and apathy.
Y.
"Kid" yourself. It's a preponderance of the population, and it's enough to make a big economic impact, which is all I claimed.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
Cows will get more expensive, if the substance of this article ever comes to pass. Then the ratio of modem prices to cow prices will be much closer to one, and everyone will be happy, right?
I would expect the local value of a cow to be much smaller in a place where cows are traditionally not eaten. I'd rather see a comparison made to something that is more universally consumed and valued, such as wheat. And don't forget to throw in some comparisons to countries like Israel where computer parts are heavily taxed in a (still) war-time economy.
[Don't mind the links -- Slashdot is munging some perfectly good code, again. Maybe the urls are just too big?...]
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
Yes, I was totally amazed to see a big sign behind the VSNL front desk proclaiming an initiative to eliminate corruption. Seems to me like the way to eliminate corruption is to fire the people who take bribes. If you then cannot hire anybody because they can't make enough without baksheesh, well, then, that's a signal from the market to pay your workers more.
Hmmm... I was wondering why my hosts pre-paid the hotel room partly in cash. Maybe credit cards are not trusted? Maybe the hotel employees were taking their cut out of the till?
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
There are no socialist countries in existance. There are many capitalist market economies which are influenced by socialist thought (and they are worse off for it), but a socialist economy requires the absence of a market. It's very unlikely that a socialist economy could survive even one natural diaster. How could it mobilize resources faster than the market? Look at how badly Orissa did, with all the interference that the Indian gov't puts in the ways of the Indian market. I'm very impressed by the Indian people's eagerness to work hard and get ahead. I'm saddened that they don't know enough about economics to shun political solutions.
-russ
p.s. Read any Indian newspaper, or read India Today if you want to see how Marxist India remains. For example, university tenure committees are full of Marxists; to get tenure you must espouse Marxist (that is, Nonsense) economics.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
I've got an Indian customer who is switching to Open Source solutions as promptly as they can. They have found that the amount of money they spend on a solution is only lightly correlated with its ability to solve their problems. They've got US investors, so money isn't a problem.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
I think that some people have felt in the past that the large number of official languages in India have been responsible for its poverty. The government tried forcing people to learn a different language, with some success at great human cost. I think you'll find that most Indians who haven't learned English have refrained for (their own) very good reasons.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
India needs to get away from the idea that all economic activities should be controlled by the government. Curiously, there are many self-help groups in India, and yet you have the remainder of the Raj, controlling, for example, every aspect of communications, whether wireless or wired.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
It is not just l10n that indian languages need. But good i10n too. Almost all the indian scripts fall under the category of complex scripts. That means, for example, if you want to display a unicode document for, say Hindi, a simple unicode font will not suffice. The unicode text needs to converted into a set of ligature glyphs based on a complex set of formating rules. As of date there is no API that can do this formating for Linux. Microsoft has the Uniscribe API for doing such tasks which will be available for Windows 2000.
While there are few efforts to bring similar tools into Linux world, one significant effort that needs support is the Pango library.
(
http://people.redhat.com/otaylor/pango).
Unless there is a good framework that supports these complex requirements in Indian scripts localisation would not be a possibility.
-Siva.
Jeez, the reasons that white Americans don't learn foreign languages? Could be that there's not mandatory foreign language instruction in secondary schools? In Japan, for instance, schoolkids are given six years of English lessons. In my high school, four years of Spanish were offered, and a mere two years of German or French..
Anyway can Spanish really be considered a forign language in the USA?
And another thing is that those older modems (say 9600 bps) are probably better at getting your data through crap phone lines. Modern V.34 modems more or less assume the phone system is gonna digitize your signal at the earliest possible opportunity.
Of course, I'm talking out of my rectum here. Does anyone have and hard evidence?
Any technology which is distinguishable from magic is not sufficiently advanced.
Perhaps having a public Internet terminal in the vicinity will give them incentive to learn to read? I know tons of people who only learned to type at a reasonable speed after being introduced to online chat systems.
Any technology which is distinguishable from magic is not sufficiently advanced.
We need a modem bank where we can donate old modems, too slow for American lines, but just right for old infrastructure.
This is an incredibly good idea. The only problem I'd foresee is the shipping, and assuming
sponsorship by an international shipper (say, DHL) that could be solved, too. Might be very
good PR for DHL in India to be the source of free US surplus modems.
JMR
Try e-gold - (contact me). I'm NOT e-
Are you suggesting someone create Microsoft Bob for Linux? anyone remember this product? Incidentally, I liked Bob. But then again, I also like cartoons and computer games. Bob was definetly not for the office user.
-- Creativity knows no medium
Telecommunication and transportation infrastructure is what improves wealth, education and peace; not the other way around.
Look in your back yard: the interstate highway system in the US was built when the US economy was doing rather poorly; yet it stimulated growth and development. What exactly was California before the coast-to-coast rail lines were built? Definitely not the 7th largest economy in the world...
That is what creates wealth: Free Trade, Free Speech. Just imagine how irrelevant the US would be in the world today without proper telecomm and transportation infrastructure. After all, America (OK, Australia too) is the only non-contiguous land mass on this planet.
engineers never lie; we just approximate the truth.
Why should you assume the same thing wouldn't work for up and coming Indian computer geeks?
,as referred in the article when Professor Venkatesh Hariharan said:
As many others have said, and as I will word (only slightly differently):
Why should you assume the same thing would work for up and coming Indian computer geeks?
What you begin with is what you will be familiar with. I, unfortunately, had my start with Windows, and I therefore seem to know more about what I'm doing while using Windows as opposed to Linux. I wish I had had a start on another OS so I could be more familiar with something more worthwhile.
It's the same with innumerable other things in life.. say, language. The language you grow up hearing/speaking/etc. will be the one you are most comfortable with (AFAIK). I grew up on English, hence, I'm better at it than I am at the foreign languages I'm studying in school now.
I conclude by saying this: You were truly thinking in the spirit of a Westerner
"The existing user interface paradigm of files and folders evolved because computers were essentially designed for a western audience familiar with real-life files and folders. There is no reason to assume
why the same paradigm should apply to a trader in Tamil Nadu or a farmer in Madhya Pradesh. "
when you made your statement because you were assuming that Windows would be a better transition for the Indians. The whole point of the article is that the Indians haven't had access to computers/an OS yet! Therefore, they need something that will work for them/be cheap/be configureable for them... Linux!
Insert mind here.
Realistically, the only solution is for the person who wants to join in to learn Engilish.
Given that to learn to program your going to have to put a lot of effort into learning to use the computer, learning the programming languages, etc, learning English really isn't that much more to ask, especially considering that, reguardless of how good i18n gets, you're still only going to be able to get most resources in English.
At some point, if people want to work together they have to settle on a standard, and the de-facto standard human language for dealing with computer stuff is English.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Dang that's harsh, especially considering all the spare modems I have sitting around, well, a 19.2, 14.4 and some PCMCIA ones.
We need a modem bank where we can donate old modems, too slow for American lines, but just right for old infrastructure.
George
URLs uses roman alphabets, right?
Well, perhaps it is all written. Anyone who wishes to use the Internet must be able to differentiate a and b.
.sigs are useless; it doesn't protect you from imposters.
Its not just about reaching 1/7 or 1/5 of the population .. its more about making available to a large population a choice... which at the present moment does not exist.. /dev/null) and other co's need to be proactive and spend some effort marketing their services in India..it maybe small today.. but just wait and watch..
most people in India simply use pirated copies of Windoze.. cos its easliy available to the present computer users...even tho they live under the threat of software piracy raids etc..
Redhat/Caldera and others(flamers >.
- ramas opines !!
... are you saying it's harder to translate stuff into Indian languages than out of German? Or that Linux has more English in it than German?
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
... but even if it's not, then picking somebody up about a single word is harsh.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Most people in India can't read anything which can be written in ASCII. This is not true in Peru (Spanish) or AFAIK any of your other examples. Right now, software is generally bad at handling text which is not ASCII-ish (i.e. "Romaniform", so Greek and Russian are OK). The first Operating System to have good support for a non-romaniform language will be a big step in the history of computers, in my opinion. If it's going to be a Free operating system then it's even bigger news in this community. So I think the story is interesting, and relevant.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
France was quite rich when I last checked. (India is not, and never has been, communist)
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Yes, one BILLION users!
Please excuse me but C plus Linux Kernel is way harder to understand and learn... till the point you can modify something, compared to English.
:)]
[I don't think I need to prove it statistically
So, it's fine for average Joe (or Mowgli (sorry it's the only generic indian name I can think of)) to have the library software localized in English but if he is willing to hack that code... he needs much more than to be able to read the comments.
And by the way, why stop to indian if we start to translate the comments? Chineze, Mexican, French, German comes to mind.
And let's suppose that decides to translate all the comments in the aforementioned languages: all development has to stop while all the comments are done.
Have you ever looked to a piece of comment hanging above a piece a code and those two saying completely different stories? If English comments tends to be outdated, what can we expect about multilanguage...?
There is a very good argument up somewhere that even that average (indian)Joe will have access to a web in hindi[1-18] he will not be able to access the rest of it and I cannot imagine milions of translators translating it for him...
And yes, my mother tongue is not English.
Salon: Technical Sutra
I happen to know that Microsoft actively recruits in India:
MS: India Development Center
This is not because Micros~1 is engaging in charity work, it is because it wants access to excellent human resources. I've read a few people saying something about "poor villagers not needing Internet access," but according to that Salon article one way for a person to improve life for him/herself and his/her family is to get into technology.
Anyway, I just wanted to point out that India is very important in computer technology. (A former computer of mine was from an Indian company, and wasn't Hotmail owned or run by an Indian before Microsoft gobbled it up?)
Anyway, I had an Indian professor who was a huge UNIX fan (he thought Linux was cool because it was more like UNIX than MS-Windows.) Come to think of it, most of my professors have been Indian, which says something about the country right there.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
Agreed. I had the same idea when I read the question. You didn't mention it, but "root" would apply equally well to this metaphor. I did a little research work with a friend back in school about 1990 who proposed the same metaphor. Guess he was thinking far ahead.
"Classic UFO's
The reason why people so far have been embracing Windows and not Linux in India (an even among the young "hackers") is due to the fact that pirated copies of Windows can easily obtained.
Also, Microsoft is making bigger inroads because they already have "Indianized" versions of Windows.
Linux may be a smart alternative in India, but it still isn't a popular one. Majors such as Redhat need to put in a lot of money and advertising in India to capture the market and develop localized products.
Since a lot of people are asking these questions, let me give some statistics about India:
1 billion people
66 % literacy rate
20 Major/Different languages with 1000s of dialects each
30 % of the country can speak Hindi
10 % can speak, read and write English
Official Govt language Hindi, however actual Government Language is English - nearly all communication from the government is in local language and English !
Home PC Penetration; a few million.
ISP and internet connections extremely affordable
especially for students.
Did I miss anything ?
"Software SuperPower?" Is that like, India's "Nuclear Super Power?"
I have always wondered why this hasn't been done before! Couldn't the OS or the browser (preferably the OS so other apps could use it) implement some translation services so that content could easily be translated into different langauges? I know for example BeOS already supports UNICODE as its charecter set, so writing in languages that use a different character set shouldn't be hard. I know there is a GPLed translation program so couldn't you implement something along the lines of...
Web sites sends text in english. Browser parses words, feeds it through a translator, then displays it in a givin character set. Hell, altavista already does something like that. Anyway, language modules could be implemented under the translator so people could add support for their favorite language into it. It would be a little slower, and you'd end up with stuff like, "he greeted the bloated blue desk" but you'd get (most) of the basic idea across.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
>they'll begin creating their own content, :->) with the amount though.
... ).
It may surprise some of you, but we already have content in our languages. We are not content (eeks
I am from India and I am connected with a website that is in Tamil. this is not the only site in Tamil and there are many sites in other languages too. My company employs nearly 40 people of whom 12-15 are html/scripting guys. SOme of the chaps who are manning these jobs are people whose mother tongue is NOT Tamil! So all of them speak English, after a fashion, communicate in Tamil interspersed with English; not necessarily only the technical words.
If the programmers' tools are available then we will create the content in our languages and English (and French, German
If SuSE can't manage to remove all the german from their distribution and it's manuals (and let's be honest - they can't), how much chance does anybody have of translating everything into Indian?
Mind you - it's still better than users being novices in both Linux and English.
Zinc was first discovered and refined in India, centuries before Europe did so.
The trick is, zinc is a vapor at the temperatures required to extract it from its ore. So refining it with medieval technology was nontrivial.
While it would be nice to translate user apps into some of the 18 (Yow!) languages spoken in India, a major point of Linux is to allow the user to modify the software to taste. What (spoken) language will the software be written in? Most existing software written in C++, or whatever your preference is, uses the English language, especially the kernel. While I understand that the intent of the article is directed to India's lower classes, what happens to the hacker who wishes to collaborate on an Enligsh-language project, who does not speak Engligh?
www.ilug-bom.org
I can throw myself at the ground, and miss.
You might have a problem with the fact that we Indians recognise quite a few variants of English (or if I may use it phonetically Inglish). Try Hinglish (Hindi+English) or Tamil English or simbly Keralite English. These are only examples and not to be taken as representative of the whole.
:).
ps, simbly is not a typo. Thats how Keralites pronounce simply
I can throw myself at the ground, and miss.
The Logic behind the localization arguements runs as follows:
If you have localized language support, you have people who will provide content in those languages. So the total local content increases, which provides further support for local language upport. Its a self feedig cycle, and we are trying to kickstart it.
I can throw myself at the ground, and miss.
Indians who are highly educated already know English. Witness the Bangalore Boom, the SiliValley of India -- they already know enough English to get by in the Anglic world of modern software. (By the way, my parents are from Karnataka, the state which contains Bangalore. Visit sometime, if you can.)
Somewhat educated people know at least a smattering of English, if nothing else for terms for which their native languages don't have words. "Refrigerator," "globalization," etc. (for example).
BUT, somewhat educated people almost ALWAYS know, if not English, Hindi! Hindi and English are the lingua francas (?) of India. At least translating some stuff into Hindi -- comments, etc. -- would make it SO much easier for somewhat educated people to make Linux their own.
Of course, maybe the next step will be for people to translate from Hindi into their 14 individual native tongues. I'm just saying that any attempt to translate Linux docs/source into Indian languages should start with either Kannada or Hindi. Kannada has its advantages, too, since most Indian computer programmers already speak Kannada (they're in Bangalore).
Ceterum censeo Microsoftam esse delendam.
Er, my name's not really Tatiana, but I *am* in Slavic 1 -- Intro to Russian -- right now (should be studying for a test tomorrow). I'd be happy to help out, except for the fact that every time I try to speak I feel like a Bond villian.
Ceterum censeo Microsoftam esse delendam.
Trilingual.
What do you call someone who knows 2 languages?
Bilingual.
What do you call someone who knows 1 language?
American.
Ceterum censeo Microsoftam esse delendam.
My cousin in Bangalore can chat with my Dad in California, USA, instead of paying out the nose for telecom rates. The only reason it's cheaper, AFAIK, is because there are now MULTIPLE ISPs in the country!
Geez, one ISP servicing an area the size of half the US, and not nearly as well-wired (i.e., quality of wiring)....think how the characters on UserFriendly would do....(-;
Ceterum censeo Microsoftam esse delendam.
Bureaucrats' wages are low; it's accepted and expected that they will compensate for those low wages via bribes. And, for anyone who's studied political science, remember that this is less a rational-legal relationship than a traditional one (in the Weberian sense) -- there are patron-client dyads everywhere, which are diffuse relationships, not limited ones.
Ceterum censeo Microsoftam esse delendam.
What makes more sense is for humanity to finally go to a common spoken and written language that is taught universally. It is a sign of just how primitive this species is that we can't seem to make any headway on such an obviously beneficial project. Of course, if we get automagical translators for speech and text anytime soon that actually work well (no Babel-fish) the point could become moot.
It would be even better to port the Indians to English.
Yes, I know this was a joke. I did laugh. But I wanted to raise a point that isn't always obvious to monolingual English speakers.
I'm the team leader for the Esperanto Translation Team for the Free Translation Project. Esperanto is unusual among languages. To the best of my knowledge, there is not a single monolingual Esperantist anywhere in the world, nor is there likely to be one any time soon. We have no native country as a language and aren't seeking one. For anyone who is confused by this, Esperanto is an artificial language created in 1887. It is usually learned as a second, third or subsequent language.
Everyone on the Esperanto Translation Team could be using free software under other languages for which the localization has already been done. I use Linux with English literals except when I an validating translations. But there is a reason to have complete locales for any language that users might want to use software in conjunction with. I can read English just fine, but when I want to write to a non-English-speaking friend in Esperanto, I need an e-mail client that can handle the character set. And when I am writing in Esperanto, it takes me a moment to switch back and forth. I don't do it instantly. Having messages, menus, etc., in the same language I am working in is a great help.
Teaching the entire world a single common language will not eliminate the need for computing environments that support their native languages. The only thing that would accomplish that would be if we all learned a single language and abandoned all others. That would involve abandoning names, literature, culture. It isn't a step many people are willing to take. Certainly, teach the world English, or French, German, Russian, Hindi, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Latin, Esperanto or any other language. Don't ask them all to give up the perfectly good languages they already have.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
Yes, there is a project for localization of free software. The Free Translation Project is an ongoing project to localize free software into as many languages as possible. If yours isn't one of the one's we're already doing, there are a number of people who can mentor you in starting a translation team for your language.
This is not the only project handling translation of free software. Several of the distributions have projects going to translate their installation tools and documentation. And both Gnome and KDE have internationalization projects.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
For example, view http://www.servlets.com/servlet/HelloRosetta via IE5/Win2000.
Mozilla is probably the only open-source app that has the right architecture to support localization and i18n. For instance, Mozilla stores language resources as XML entities, making them easy to localize. Very nice solution IMHO.
Both the Windows and Java API's have significant support for i18n and l18n, such as full support for various character encodings, support for resource files builtin, Collation (being able to do String comparisons and sorting on non-English languages), Time, Date, Metric, and Money formating, etc.
is not the kernel and device drivers supporting it (which they do), but the fact that there isn't an easy to use, widely adopted API for locating language resource strings. In userland, thousands of GNU utilities and scripts shipped with Linux all have hardcoded English language strings in them.
Thus, for any company that wants to create a "RwandaLinux", not only do they have to translate documentation, but they must hire programmers (not writers) who can translate embedded strings in the thousands of userland utilities that ship with typical Linux distributions, and that is a monumental task.
In addition to translating them, they must make sure they are kept up to date with their English counterparts.
None of this is going to change until programmers stop writing code like
printf("The task completed successfully.")
and
if(!strcmp(argv[c], "-delete"))
and start writing code like
printf(getResource(TASK_COMPLETION_MESSAGE));
if(!strcmp(argv[c], getResource(CMDLINE_OPTION_DELETE))
When that happens, there will be no need to keep localized versions "up to date" with the newest CVS trees, but the program text will be separated from the logic.
I'm a bit surprised that the big corporations haven't pursued the market for Indian-language computing more aggressively. Many of them have large numbers of bilingual programmers brought over on work visas. Given the sheer size of the potential market in India, I'd expect them to leverage this advantage.
One thing to note (and a possible reason for the lack of translation) is that there is no single "Indian language"; as with Chinese, there are several regional dialects which don't always bear much resemblance to each other. In practice, English ends up getting used a lot of the time as a universal standard. If you walk through Bombay, most of the billboards you see will be in English. The few times I've been there, most of the shopkeepers understood enough English to successfully complete a transaction.
Now, out in the villages, this is not true. On the other hand, I doubt the people in the villages care whether or not they have Internet access just yet. They need sanitation, electricity, and other basic health-improving technology. Once that's in place, then worry about whether or not they can be happy Amazon consumers.
Alik
Mac OS 9 includes multiple language kits, so you can mix Hindi, Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Hebrew, Korean and more in a single document. (They aren't in the default install, but they are there in Custom).
The APIs have been in MacOS for years, but the language kits used to be hard to get - now they are in the shipping OS.
The interesting thing is that americans "surrounded by electronic gadgets have at least as hard a time (if not harder) wrestling with computers , firstly because there is much fiercer competition in schools etc. witness the number of asian software engineers migrating to the USA in droves.
Linkedin http://in.linkedin.com/in/robinsaikatchatterjee
I love linux, don't get me wrong, but how the hell can linux be ported to hindi, tamil, whatever when it hasn't been ported to English? Just take a look at your /etc folder. How many of those file names can be found in webster's dictionary? Or take the cryptic linux commands, for example. Is dd a word in the english language? Or mv, cpio, umount, or anything else. One cannot take seriously the idea of porting linux for non-english speakers when it *hasn't* yet been ported for English speakers.
And when you get right down to it, if you preload NT or 95/98 to require a password and you preload a Linux box to start in init 5 with gnome/gdm, your average new user would undoubtedly have exactly the same level of difficulty learning either.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
maybe so, but i would have to be the one who has to do all that translating. yeesh.
jinkusu
When I got my passport about 15 years ago, it listed everything in English and French. When I asked why, I was told that "French was the official international language". It could be that it's not "official" any more, but at the passport office at least, there is still some French momentum.
--
No, answers like yours show how far away India is from become a world-dominant country.
When Asian countries wanted to grow their economies, did they whine that everyone wouldn't learn Asian languages? No, they learned English because they realized that international business is conducted in English.
If you want to produce Indian-language content for Indian-language people, go right ahead. But to argue that the Indian people should be closed off from the world's information until the world's information is translated is just stupid.
--
Who is talking about civilizing? That's your own bigotry and prejudice speaking.
I'm talking about growing your economy, and bringing your country out of starvation. Wouldn't it be nice if your farmers could read the latest agricultural journals? Oh wait, they better wait until they're translated.
International business is conducted in English. Should the average citizen have the opportunity to engage in international business, or should that only be reserved for the Elite who can afford to become fluent in English?
And if you haven't noticed, most of the information on the web is in English. Is this information only "appropriate" for the rich in India? Are they only to learn "outside" information that the Elite (or the government) deems appropriate to translate?
Yes, it's easy to say "if they need it, they'll learn it", and this argument might even fly in richer countries, but something tells me that India doesn't have quite the same infrastructure for the poorest citizens to be able to access English tutoring.
Once a citizen knows English, and has access to a computer in a library, even the poorest individual has access to much of the knowledge of the world. That citizen can bypass "approved" translations (which might or might not be accurate).
--
You'll notice that I said "as a second language".
I agree that it's enriching to learn other languages, but the reason that most of the world speaks (and is taught) multiple languages is practicality. English is the international language, so it makes sense for someone who speaks non-English to learn the "standard" language. In the US, we already speak the "standard" language, so there is no great incentive to learn another one, except for cultural purposes (as you point out).
--
First of all, programming is not done in Asian languages, because there is no computer language that uses an Asian language (Is there an Chinese symbol for 'printf'?). Moving past the obvious to your argument about learning English...
You could make EXACTLY the same argument about education in general... "They worked from sun-up to sun-down scrambling to shine shoes. And they had no homes. What use is education to them, except to talk to condescending tourists? Wouldn't that money and time have been better spent on permanent homes?"
The point of education is to give people the tools to raise themselves above their standing. Maybe if that shoeshine guy knew English, he could study the innumerable amount of information on the web in order to learn a better skill. Or heck, the person could order any number of textbooks (how many are printed in his particular dialect?) He would be able to read CNN to get accurate information about his government in order to help affect change.
The problem with your line of reasoning is that the needs never end. Yes, yet more money could be spent on food and shelter, but this is not a long term solution, because you've done nothing to make the people self sufficient. There simply is not enough resources (in ANY country) to take care of every individual. You have to give each individual an opportunity to better themselves through hard work. And that opporunity begins with an open flow of information.
--
Er, I never said that English should be taught to the exclusion of all other education. Obviously that would be absurd.
--
First let me say that I understand the need for computers that work in native languages.
But, it seems as if much of the point of essay is to improving the Indian economy and help them get "plugged in" to the world. If that's the goal, then it's much more important to change the education infrastructure so that the majority of the population learns English as a second language.
As the professor himself points out, most of the web is in English. Once Indians are on the web, they will still be limited in the information that they can use. Imagine the effect of citizens being able to access all the information of the web, not just information that originates in India (or is written in an Indian language).
English is the standard international language of the world (Yes, I know French is "officially" the international language, but... that's a joke). For any country that wants to break out of "third world" status, a population fluent in English is absolutely critical.
--
First India, now China.. things are looking good for linux.
This is far from a general solution, but for you personally, have you tried to get IE running under linux? I've heard, with some work, it's possible to get the last Solaris version of IE working under linux. It might at least keep you from having to reboot to read Arabic.
Does anyone know if Mozilla is Semitic-languages-friendly? Or if Gnome or KDE are going to be any time soon?
I don't want to sound like a troll, but shouldn't the indians be more concerned about overpopulation, poverty and the usual like disease, famine and war with pakistahn? It's just like the UN talking about taxing the west's email use to build better telecom infrastructures in 3rd world nations despite the fact that most of the people in those countries are either too poor to afford the necessary equipment or are starving to death.
Directories represented as 3d hallways with files represented by 3d objects.
Directories and files represented in html as links and lists. Basically what's being done on the web. Would definately make home computers more organized.
How about a library representation. Each book a directory with chapters and subchapters as subdirectorys and all linked back to an index. Also a very organized way to represent data.
Or for the virtual reality buffs how about a 3d representation organized using objects. A virtual notebook containing all your letters. A virtual tv with channels linked to your favorite videos. A library for all your ebooks and a museum for your artwork. You could take this kind of representation as far as you want. This type of representation would be easy for todays computers.
Just some ideas do what you want with them. I never think of directorys as folders anyway. I grew up using DOS.
Environmentalists are their own worst enemy. ~tricklenews.com
Many of the points above are shared with other non-Western languages (lack of a single standard character set, the issue of linguitics, user interface, ...etc.)
Here in the Middle East, we face a strikingly similar set of problems, with some added bonus. People who speak Arabic as a first language were about 181 million in 1997 (according to this Times article), making it the Fifth language in the world after Mandarin Chinese, English, Spanish and Hindi.
Arabic is unique in that it needs the peripherals (the VT100 terminal and the printer) to support automatic contextual character shaping on the fly, and Right-to-Left orientation. It shares these qualities with other Semitic language (Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Nabatean). So, a character set and a font is not enough, like the case in most western language.
Several years ago, there were lots of character sets, each in use by a different hardware vendor, and even many vendors had several character sets. A standard (called ASMO-708) emerged, and was adopted by almost all vendors using ASCII (IBM was EBCDIC, so they were different).
In the early 1990s, a company called Al Alamia developed a version of Microsoft Windows 3.x that supports many character sets, including ASMO-708. Microsoft hired (read stole!) the main developer from Al Alamia, there was a law suit.
When Windows 95 came, the battle was won (by MS!) in the Arabic arena.
When the web arrived, things got even worse (from a standard point of view) and a Netscape version (called Sindbad) was developed by Sakhr to navigate the web in Arabic, and lately released it as a plug-in to Navigator 4.x. It is terribly slow though. Microsoft won the browser wars, and virtually all the Arabic users are now using Windows 95/98/NT with MS Internet Explorer. New development of Arabic web pages is almost done entirely for MS Internet Explorer. Not good!
Dynamic fonts are great and are used by a few sites. They work great with MS IE or NS Navigator, but are not widely used.
So, where does this leave Linux? There are:
- No arabized GUI for Linux at all, which makes me still use a dual boot to get Arabic.
- No good arabized browsers under Linux either.
- Microsoft is gaining a virtual monopoly on a whole culture of 22 or so countries!
I am still using Netscape for e-mail and browsing (even on Windows, and fed up with its problems!), but have to use MS IE for browsing Arabic web pages! Sad!I have some links on Arabic on the web (scroll to the bottom of the page on what is available for Arabic on the net.
--
Have you checked out Muslim Investor?
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
The web is a very effective information provider
Didn't "International English" replace French as the International language about 50 years ago? I thought that French as the international language collapsed when France did in WWI. I could of course, be wrong.
Alex
...a constructed language like Esperanto?
http://www.esperanto.org/
or
http://www.esperanto.net/
(Mark my words, some idiot will have a web page talking about Open Sourcing the English language... and be completely serious.)
Wiwi
--
"I trust in my abilities,
but I want more then they offer"
Wiwi
"I trust in my abilities,
but I want more then they offer"
Description from (http://www.quetzal.com/conlang/intern.html):
A United Nations University project to create an interlanguage for use on the internet; the idea being that you'd use special tools to create a document in this language and it would be automatically translated into any of the UN member languages on demand. They plan to make this feasible by restricting the grammar and vocabulary of the interlanguage, and have translation be only one-way, from the interlanguage to national languages. The interlanguage's vocabulary will be English words, with probably some type of grammatical markup added -- not intended for people to read or use directly. [Institute of Advanced Studies, United Nations University]
Seems like a possible answer for making programs more "international" if an interperter could be incorporated directly.
For those of you smarter then I (which means just about all of you..), check out http://www.unl.ias.unu.edu for more information.
Wiwi
--
"I trust in my abilities,
but I want more then they offer"
Wiwi
"I trust in my abilities,
but I want more then they offer"
How about a translator program? c2hindi to change the keywords in c-code to Hindi equivalents, and hindi2c to take c-code written using those Hindi equivalents and translate back to standard c. Table-driven, of course, so it could be Inuit-2-c or Urdu-2-c just as quickly and easily.
This would internationalize the functional part of the source code quickly and easily, and let the international version stay just hours behind the english version. Translating the comments would be many orders of magnitude harder, so this isn't a complete solution, but at least someone who is literate in Hindi could look at the source code and get a clue about what's going on.
This might be a great project for the Linux internationalization effort, since it might simplify teaching programming. You wouldn't have to learn english to learn c, and you wouldn't have to make some strange, non-standard language for non-english speakers.
Do any programmers from non-english-speaking countries have any thoughts on this?
Nels
See what I've been reading.
I can see the PR people when they get ahold of this:
"Linux, the official OS of the largest democracy in the world. Get yours today."
I do what the voices on my console tell me to do.
I think most would agree that while English remains the de-facto language of technology, a great need for locale support exists.
Many disciplines benefit from contributors who do not speak or read English. Mathematics comes immediately to mind; a significant portion of development in pure mathematic research stems from Russian speaking scientists. I'd hate to think how many advances would be lost to that community if support for that paticular locale wasn't widely available.
Open Source software definitely provides the best avenue for international support - reference the support of the Finnish government for Linux for educational use over Windows due to Microsoft's unwillingness to provide them with the proper langauge support.
Providing non-English speaking developers the power to support their local language is a prime reason for the power and popularity of Open Source. Diversity is often a Good Thing(TM). Open Source empowers that diversity in a big way.
So E is relatively prime to (P-1)(Q-1)... Odd, that.
Rich
I completely agree. I had next to no knowledge of Windows when I started my computer use on FreeBSD and Linux. I found Unix(I consider Linux Unix too) to be understandable enough so I didn't turn away and run. A good project to facilitate the process( and probably a very large one) would be to translate the manpages into the native Indian language. I'm sure this would be a great start.
Consider the Mexico redhat deal (I think it's actually mentioned in the article) -- I think linux would certainly be the best route to take.
Consider the (major) problem created by the prevalence of Microsoft: People expect computers to be inherently unstable. This is a Very Bad Thing, and is widespread amongst novice users.
Linux would go a long way towards preventing this. Sure, people may think computers are confusing -- but once people realize that computers can be reliable... well then we'll start to see some real widespread acceptance of technology integration.
Coin some new terms, add the words MP3, Linux and opensource (okay he didn't say it but I'm generalizing), connect them with some yarn and scotch tape and you've got a cool new Slashdot- approved infomative essay.
"Yet, India faces a peculiar problem in that almost all popular operating systems and applications packages are available only in English, a language which is spoken by a mere ten percent of the population."
(Let's not forget to mention that we are actually dealing with 42% of the population, 52% of india is literate, and it's a safe bet that all 10% who speak english are literate)
Virtually all high school educated people in india (=those who have enough money to buy a computer) have enough command of the english languge to use software, understand help bubbles etc. I am not saying that a high scool education should be a pre-req for using a computer; however a massive xlation project would cause too many splits; and not return on the money it would take to maintain and produce indian versions of all sorts of software (you realize how much there is? who deicdes what GPL software gets xlated?) and to maintain all the fun compatability issues that will happen.
"One development that can help India out of this deadlock is a national-level, collaborative effort to localise Linux to Indian languages."
Localise linux? Localizing the kernel and device drivers wouldn't do much good IMHO. Oh wait you mean all the software available for linux (most of it which it intended to run on many different unicies)?? Oh I get it...so you plan on xlating all GPL utilies (ssh, ls, mv, cron), their input and output file formats, display information, KDE, GNOME, all software documentation (what good is software if you don't know how to use it), error messages?...and keep up with anything that joe blow releases under GPL? The above proposal is just catagorically wrong.
"Linux is a free operating system that has gained phenomenal popularity in recent times because it allows users to modify it to suit their own needs."
While Linux's development grwoth has stemmed from kernel hackers modifying linux at the base; it "phenomenal popularity" has nothing to do with it. Linux is a stable, free UNIX; one can run all sorts of wonderful wide-spread UNIX stuff on it, and use it as a solid server; that's why it is popular. In general, users do not modify linux beyond any other OS, changing drivers, installing libraries and applications, and system settings; everybody does this with every OS.
"The growth of content in platform-independent file formats (HTML, MP3 etc) has also reduced the dependence on a specific operating system, making Linux a viable option."
I can't think of any widely used content before html (really platform independant?) that was OS dependant. ASCII, UNICODE, gif, wav, jpg, etc. Linux is no more or less viable due to the fact that we are using platform independant content...we have generally always been. Application independant is another story, which would definately point to a negative for linux (for tools that would be in most general use wp's, spreadsheets, database creation tools etc...)
"The existing user interface paradigm of files and folders evolved because computers were essentially designed for a western audience familiar with real-life files and folders. There is no reason to assume why the same paradigm should apply to a trader in Tamil Nadu or a farmer in Madhya Pradesh. "
Well assuming that the complaint is about the graphical representation of the underlying OS representation of files n' directories (which is the same as linux) under the Windows shell...under a graphical desktop environment (KDE/GNOME) of linux, they are represented the same way. And anyone could write a shell for either OS that pictured directories as books and pages or whatever...
"The openness of Linux (and other free operating systems like Free BSD) allows local linguistic groups to customise user interfaces in ways that are far more culturally sensitive than any centrally controlled approach. Linguistic groups that may be considered too small a market by vendors can also take their destiny in their own hands by customising the Linux interface to their own needs."
The abstraction level at which UI software as described is as easily implimented under ,say, windows as linux. In terms of development, the UI really doesn't have much to do with the OS as any other application...linux isn't any more or less easily localizeable than any other OS.
I won't even get into cost issues, besides the fact that it is debatable...
To me, the article is just another "be cool, say linux" essay clone...but hell it might be a good a way of getting the government to get scared of not being cool and to pump some money in which can help some people. I suppose the only practical solution is to invest in language xlation research and come up with a good translator for the non-english readers.
I haven't come across any reference to xlinux at /.
I think it's relevent here, as it may be the first large-scale attempt to "globablise" linux - it's a commercial venture that is translating linux text into 12 asian languages - recently got some coverage on cnbc asia
http://www.xlinux.com/index_1.html
cheers
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be . . . an easy way to factor large prime numbers"
Bill Gates, 1995
It would be even better to port the Indians to English.
Sure, they're not very portable, but with a little re-programming, they will even be able to get onto the internet. In addition, not only will they benefit from [cough]Open Source, but then they'll be able to use my wonderful Windows Products in English.
It will save a lot of work for my programmers, to not have to port Windows to another language, and they can use the free time to implement some other features I've been wanting. Security, stability, are a couple of features I've heard good things about. Platform independance sounds kinda neat, for hardware anyway...
Regardless, it is very important that you cease your efforts to port Linux to Indian languages, but rather port Indians to English..
Sincerely,
Bill Gates
(Score 5, Monopoly)
Have you tried my newest software? Microsoft.com
yeah different regions of the world have different flavors of english, accented like the usual language in the country and using slang and words from other languages. like singlish (from s'pore), chenglish (from HK) and so on
can anyone tell me how many characters are allowed in unicode, from a number i heard before theres not enough space for chinese *alone* - never mind all the other languages in the world
65000 characters in total, lets see... it might be enough but u have to fit traditional, simplifiied chracters in there plus japanese and korean versions of chinese characters plus the few thousand cantonese only characters... so maybe you'll need to use about 35000 spaces for CJK
I kinda like the idea that the "File/Folder" paradigm is western-centric. I mean, really it does deal in organizational concepts geared towards tie-wearing office drones. That said, I can't think of a better way of expressing the heirarchical tree concept. Would anybody else who's actually from India care to comment on the matter, and perhaps suggest a more culturally appropriate scheme?
I would imagine that an image like bags or boxes might be more appropriate than folders. One comment that I remember hearing is that the file/folder image is actually somewhat inappropriate because people rarely use deeply nested heirachies of folders. Putting one box or bag inside another is much more common, so it's intuitively more reasonable.
I also think that the file metaphor is a bit dated. After all, many "files" these days are the function equivalent of things very different from physical files. They include a wide variety of things from movies and photgraphs to movie players and game boxes. You can see that people already feel that way from the icons that they choose to represent their files, and most of those objects would never fit into a file folder.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Obviously, all programming languages today are a subset of english with some punctuational and structual differences. A non-english speaking (reading) person confronted with a totally non-english computer environment will surely not have that much incentive learning english (not at least to operate his computer).
This way, if the person in question want to program his computer, how will he be able to do that ? Why not port C to punjabi ? it should be a matter of patching gcc, now wouldn't it ? This is just so cool!
return -ENOSIG;
I kinda like the idea that the "File/Folder" paradigm is western-centric. I mean, really it does deal in organizational concepts geared towards tie-wearing office drones. That said, I can't think of a better way of expressing the heirarchical tree concept. Would anybody else who's actually from India care to comment on the matter, and perhaps suggest a more culturally appropriate scheme?
Freedom: "I won't!"
As some AC mentioned, support for multibyte characters is readily available in several (non-free) operating systems. The problem is translation of the software. All the major stuff is available for CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) because that's where money can be made. The article mentions the 18 official languages in India, and that's the problem. None of the big commercial vendors has taken the effort of translating into these languages, and this is where Open Source can help, by enabling the locals to do it themselves.
Actualy, in win3.1 the close widget was on the left hand side. In win9x/nt4+ it's on both sides.
Amber Yuan (--ell7)
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
People in India speak English just like people in America speak English. Its there official language. And just like Americans have some different words for some things, Indians probably have some different words from America.
That said, I don't think the word 'deadlock' is strictly in the domain of computer science. Therefore you are an idiot (a word common in all strains of English, btw)
Amber Yuan (--ell7)
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
I think Linux will win out, not because of the language issue (which sure as hell helps),
Huh? what the hell crack are you smoking? Windows is way way ahead of us as far as language issues. Trust me.
Amber Yuan (--ell7)
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
Doubleclick. The thing has the exact same functionality as in win31.
Amber Yuan (--ell7)
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
Although many deny it, English dominates the languages of the world in terms of the power wielded by English-language speakers. I respect, and am, in fact, facinated by non-English languages. However, while Hindi support is definatly a plus for Linux, we need to keep in mind that the end goal is to open the possibility of communications between everyone, not one single group.
The Indian Institute of Technology and the Indian Institute of Information Technology must keep open communication because the worst thing that can happen is incompatibility. When the institutes finish work on such localized versions (dialects?) they must above all be compatible even if it means modifying the original language slightly. As for whether to call a file a "file", look at the hundreds of translations of linux. Numbers anyone??
I would also like to note that i'm happy that the majority of the population of India and China are starting out with a real operating system, so when Microsoft tries to go and gain ground in the Indian OS debate the enlightened Indians will simply laugh at the silly little operation system.
I KNOW this sounds silly, but think - so many of you reading this got your start using Windows, and moved on to a superior OS when you got more experience. Why should you assume the same thing wouldn't work for up and coming Indian computer geeks?
I just read an article today that estimates that by 2003 the U.S. will account for only 35% of all internet users, down from 70% and that 30% will be from Europe and another 20% from Asia. This means that the Internet will not only be in English anymore and as much as you would like to think English will be a unifying language that everyone in the world will use, if it happens it will not happen for a long time. This means companies that want to compete globally will have to create localized versions of their software and internet sites or they will lose out to someone else who will. Linux will in fact fare better in India and China because it is cheaper, if they can localize the OS. The U.S. may have launched the internet but it will not be a U.S. English only internet for very much longer as the rest of the world catches up to our technologies. Anyone who thinks in U.S.-centric terms will be left out in the cold with the era of Globalization.
We all have seen how differences in programming languages generates different solutions, some better, some worse. I think the same logic can be placed on natural languages, they provide a different structure for humans to understand their world. Someone who speaks a language that is barely related at all to the predominate language in programming culture, English, would have a different perspective of the logic puzzles inherent in programming. Learning the different semantics in Japanese helped me immensely in programming, not because source code is written in Japanese, but it made me more aware of how different languages are suited to different things. This is why we need to internationalize linux, not just because we need more linux users, but we need more linux users that grew up with a different language and culture than the standard Western European/North american linux standard.
"My head hurts, My feet stink, and I dont love Jesus." -Jimmy Buffett