Linux Localization And E-governance

BhondaiPola writes "The Telegraph has an interesting article about the works of a Bengali Linux localization group. The article speaks of the potential areas in which localization can be implemented, especially, E-governance. Most of the stuff is known to us, but the article should serve as a nice introductory article for anyone new to the issue. And I liked the screenshots of the localized GNOME in the website of the group."

Comments

Gnome i18n is great

[leoboiko]

Internationalization was the major reason that made me switch to Gnome.

Thanks to im-ja I can switch freely between European (Brazilian Portuguese) and Japanese input in any GTK app, something I could do only in Emacs. Gnome-terminal can work with any encoding and switch them at runtime.

listing of various localized gnome

[stonebeat.org]

I think we should put together a list of localized gnomes. If you know of other gnome localization effort, please reply to this posting with the URL to the project. I will then compile a list. Thanks.

pic of computer

[manganese4]

I find it interesting that they paired a picture of a 20 year old computer (running Calc 123?) with a story on purported cutting edge use of computers. Most likely an accident but it does highlight linux's ability to perform well just about anywhere.

Re:pic of computer

[Minna Kirai]

Nope - you just can't buy 333MHz packages anymore.

Blatantly nonfactual.

Theory was that the prices of computers would fall.

I don't recall anyone credible espousing such a theory. It's a rather ignorant idea... (Unless you're looking at it from a large enough scale where prices genuinely have fallen, which is the case over a 4+ year measurement)

It's true that marketing pressure causes people to replace computers unnessecarily. But the idea that "if not for greedy marketers, we'd all be buying new PIII 400mhz computers for $40" is completely unfounded.

It doesn't really cost all that much less, today, to built a 300mhz CPU than a 3000mhz one. Major R&D improvements were needed so that 3000mhz would even be possible... but now that the money's been spent, there'd be little financial incentive to continue building the slow ones. If some insane vendor wanted to build new 100mhz Pentium computers (from new parts, not leftovers) it would cost nearly as much as a new bargain-basement 1.4Ghz system. There's no meaningful savings from using the weaker stuff.

Look at the automobile market. A 1993 car is $1000, a 1997 is $5000, and a 2003 is $15000. The old stuff is cheaper... but there is no way a manufacturer could build a new car to 1993 standards for any less than a 2003 model.

Re:Nascent?

[frodo from middle ea]

That is only one side of it, The other being that English is very well rooted in India.

,All the scientific studies are in English, Infact the only subjects you study after highschool in native languages are the languages themselves. And students tend to avoid those subjects too. <P> A Indian student is more career oriented , when it comes to choosing subjects in college, rather than choosing based on interests.<P>That being said, lot of students persue non technical classes like (languages, music) in their spare time, but hardly as a part of their curriculum.<P>
Almost all govt. paperwork is in englush, though supplimented by local language. All official business work is in english. The court documents all its transcrtips in English.<P>
This is one of the major reason that , support for native language is not a major factor in India, for adoptation of Computers in Every day life.

Re:Information about Bangladesh

[belmolis]

Although there are quite a few languages in India with small numbers of speakers, the major languages have considerable numbers of speakers. Bengali is one of the largest, with 200 million speakers split between India and Bangladesh. The largest is Hindi, with 180 million first language speakers in India but an estimated 487 million first and second language speakers worldwide. Here are the numbers of first language speakers in India for the other major languages:
Telugu70 million
Marathi68 million
Tamil62 million
Gujarati45 million
Kannada35 million
Malayalam35 million
Oriya32 million
Panjabi27 million
Assamese15 million

(Sorry about the formatting. /. doesn't seem to be able to handle HTML tables.) The figures above are from the Ethnologue. The figures from the 1991 Indian census can be found here.

Great Hardware!

[tonyr60]

The picture in the Telegraph article looks suspiciously like an IBM PC XT. Are they a typical workstation in India? If so, I see some problems...