Linux to be Available in 13 Indian Languages

bablooo writes "Red Hat announced today that its flagship Red Hat Enterprise Server would be available in 13 Indian Languages. In February 2005, the first 5 Indian language versions will be available - Bangla, Hindi, Punjabi, Gujrati and Tamil. By Feb 2006, it will be available in Marathi, Telegu, Kannada, Oriya, Malayalam and Urdu among others. You may want to look at a bit more details of what kind of work is going on in translating Linux to Bangla . This should enable more proliferation of Linux into local Govt. usage in India, which is a good thing"

Comments

Interesting how it will work

[tod_miller]

Surely some machines will have to run on 13 different languages (some must be more like dialects right?) at the same time... so switching between 13 languages, what kind of performance hit will that take?

Also, documents encode the language on them, so changing between documents and editing should work for 13 languages, similar or different (english, hindi, korean)

Come to think of it, except for the linux part, seems like a news article for linguists!

I think it is a good thing, how many languages is windows supporting?

How many will they support in t+20 minutes?

In Korea, Linux In 13 Indian Languages Is Only For Old People.

I don't have the strenght anymore

Re:Interesting how it will work

[biglig2]

Well, windows just added Welsh. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/4059921.s tm , http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=20005, http://www.bigfib.com/issue17/tech1-en.html.

The last link answers a lot of questions...

Re:Interesting how it will work

[pamri]

Windows(XP) and Linux more or less support the same no. of languages. The latter more, because of obvious reasons. In fact, the technology ( Opentype fonts ) used for Indian and other Complex text languages like Arabic, Urdu, Khmer,etc., was actually created by Microsoft and now supported in QT, GTK and other X11 apps that use the m17 library As far as Indian language is concerned, Microsoft had the first mover advantage in terms of input & reading Indian languages, but in the past 4-5 years, Linux has caught on and is ahead in terms of translation of applications & DE's like kde,gnome,mozilla, openoffice.org,etc.,

Some links:

Indlinux A project localising FLOSS apps into Hindi and providing support for other teams working on other Indian languages.

Indlinux wiki has got a fortnightly newsletter and other pieces of info.

Kannada Localisation Initiative a project localising and translating FLOSS applications into Kannada

Indic computing project Similar to Indlinux in structure, but focussing on documentation and support for ISV's, linguists and Developers

Re:Interesting how it will work

[kosmosik]

Translated == probably a subset of so called "supported" (by vendor) flagship applications. like most common: system tools, office suite, pim, standard desktop, mail/web client and so on... Not every app in system (probably it makes no sense to localize some rarely used developer application)...

Re:Interesting how it will work

[Neelay Thaker]

It is not the case that some computers will run 13 languages at the same time. Each region has its regional language and almost all part of the country understands Hindi. So, one machine will only run one language at a time- hindi or the regional language. I personally think that this is a good move by Reh Hat Inc towards promoting Linux in the Indian subcontinent. Windows Xp doesnot support any Indian language- http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=292246

Re:Interesting how it will work

[codecracker007]

XP has a Hindi Language Interface Pack for more than a year now..and the amount of localization(in sense of language) it gives it much much more than what Fedora Core 3 has provided just recently.

This should help increase the rate...

[Pacifix]

... at which Indian companies leverage open source technologies to become more sleek and responsive, and thus compete more aggressively with American firms. That's a good thing - depending on which side of the Indian Ocean (and Pacific) you're on. It'll certainly help India move further into a information economy, by addressing the challenges such a polyglottal society faces, while the US continues to not deal with its major obstacle: a poor education system that doesn't prepare a workforce for the new century's technologies.

Re:This should help increase the rate...

[LizardKing]

It's primarily going to help companies based in India to compete more effectively with their North American and European counterparts, but I can see another benefit. At my last company in the UK, we were asked to spec up a version of our software for a warehouse in Birmingham. The firm was a textiles and clothing company, part of an industry that's dominated by Asian entrpreneurs. Their staff are mostly first generation immigrants from the Indian subcontinent with little or no grasp of English. We had to decline the offer of putting in a bid for the contract because at the time we couldn't find a Linux distro with decent support for Indian languages.

Nice idea indeed

[ilithiiri]

But still, not *every* application in userspace has been programmed to use locales and/or strings in different languages.

On my gentoo I tried setting the language to Italian.. it was a mix of Italian and English, really weird.

If only every programmer programmed with MULTI-LANGUAGE in mind..

Well, as long as programs are OS, one can always send a patch for multi-language inclusion..
Time to do it! ;)

Re:Nice idea indeed

[LizardKing]

On my gentoo I tried setting the language to Italian.. it was a mix of Italian and English, really weird.

If only every programmer programmed with MULTI-LANGUAGE in mind..

A lot of desktop software (GNOME, KDE, etc.) is programmed with multi-language support, but the translations often lag behind the latest releases. That's why you often see a mix of non-English and English when switching locales.

Which reminds me, does anyone know how to get Java to use a localised resource bundle rather than the default one? Setting LANG and LOCALE environment variables works for programs in languages like C/C++ that are using gettext, but my Java programs stubbornly refuse to use anything but the default resource bundles.

Re:Nice idea indeed

[noselasd]

Most are. But that doesn't automagically translate them to every language. Someone needs to do the translation as well, and with many
apss they're just half done, which probably is your problem :)

Re:Nice idea indeed

[gl4ss]

well.. I don't care as much for total translation- especially in cases where there isn't a good equivalent for the word especially even- as i'm for being able to use the special characters of one's language.

They should translate...

[orabidoo]

They definitely should translate Gentoo Linux into Telugu.

After all, Gentoo is an alternative (deprecated) name for the Telugu. language.

So does Red Dwarf run windows?

[tod_miller]

Rimmer: "Broadcast on all frequencies and all known languages, including Welsh." - Red Dwarf

Never gets tired.

Patent Problems?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

I'm sorry RedHat, but your method of converting Linux to Several Indian Languages has already been covered by pat No 8U11541T " A system for converting software string data in one language into a second language, related or unrelated to the first, in order to promote increased uptake of product in a foreign market, using a computer"

All complaints can be sent to the USPTO, and will be rigorously examined and then past to Homeland Security for Subversive Threat Examination.

All Your Languages are belong to us!

All the better...

[Anonymous Coward]

All the better to steal your job with!

A major necessity

[sahirh]

This is definetely a step in the right direction given the scope for using OSS especially GNU/Linux in a country like India. Microsoft has not done enough to improve its locale support for India, which has one of the largest and fastest growing IT sectors.

As an example of how useful this would be, I used to be a technical consultant and trainer to the Mumbai Cyber Crime Lab. Most of the officers I trained there speak only Marathi, a language spoken in Maharashtra. Their acceptance of information technology would be much better if the operating system was in their own language.

Given that these are all people starting fresh out with computers, they would probably also find it easier to accept an alternate o/s such as GNU/Linux, as opposed to someone who had been weened on Windows.

Server software translated? Why?

[mandreiana]

What impact will have server software translated? I agree on installers, but what it's there to translate on apache, postfix, vsftpd.. besides documentation?

Re:Server software translated? Why?

[JohnQPublic]

Have you ever looked at an Apache config file? It's English all over the place!

Yes, I know, *nobody* is talking about i18n'ing and l10n'ing config files. And they probably shouldn't be, because there are *lots* of programs that play with other programs' config files. But shouldn't we be thinking about the non-English speakers when we design configuration support too?

Language fun

[spaceyhackerlady]

I've been messing around with computers and other languages for a while...

One early experience, while doing email development, was flipping a coin and setting my desktop email client to run in Spanish. I thought the messages it sent might hit some different parts of our server code (they did). It also resulted in phone calls like "Hi Laura, I'm going to Costa Rica next month, could you help me with my hotel reservations?"

Another time I wrote some nice Mac software and undertook to translate it to French - partly for the hell of it, partly for an upcoming trade show in Europe, and partly to smoke out localization bugs. It worked out fine, though, as usual, the translated text strings were almost invariably longer than their English equivalents. The usual "language" for localization tests was pig Latin, but I thought it was more fun to use a real language instead. Besides, we could sell the results to customers.

I've never messed with multi-byte character sets, or those with special rendering requirements. I have an excellent article in my files from Scientific American some years ago about the issues in rendering text in multiple languages.

The sort of example that makes life interesting was rendering the phrase "Welcome to the United States of America", where the "Welcome to" part was in Arabic (right to left), while the "United States of America" was in English (left to right). How do you break lines and wrap text to make this readable, and to generally look "right"? Being a cursive script, Arabic has a large number of mandatory ligatures. Each letter has (potentially) 4 different forms. Software must take all this in to account when it displays text.

The article also talked about Korean (clumps of syllables), Thai and Hindi (letters morph all over the place), Hebrew (books for kids have marking for vowels; books for adults don't). And so on.

...laura

Re:Language fun

[Lord Omlette]

I don't suppose you remember which article it was? eg month/year?

Re:Language fun

[spaceyhackerlady]

I don't suppose you remember which article it was? eg month/year?

Not exactly, and a look through my files suggests my copy was a casualty of one of the times I have moved since then.

Try 1982 +/- a year or two.

...laura

Addi Polli.... Malayalam Linux!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Aha.. addi polli.. Malayalam Linux varinondu... nyan Windows Kalayalan povannu.... Linux varite' mone'...pettinu varite'!!!

languages in other languages

[CaptainPinko]

i've thought about creating a preprocessor that would let a user program in polish and then it would process into standard english java and then compile it. while the keywords are easy i don't think the whole api would be a problem once you got a little help from the community.

most classes are combinations from a small set of words. I bet Java's core vocabulary is ~50 and with almost all classes being able to be captured with less than a hundred words? For exmaple how many classes can be made with just the words "Array" "List" "Stream" "Factory" "String" "File" "Input" "Output" "Buffer" "Reader" alone?

Indian

[schnits0r]

What about Cree, Mohawk, or Souix? Tansi Penguin :D

zerg

[Lord Omlette]

APRO BAPRE! (that's spelled wrong, but you know what I meant >_<)

So who's got good links to tutorials on writing multi-langauge software for UNIX command line?

(I only ask because on windows it's usually just editing a resource file... but on UNIX, input & output is always text, no GUI...)

gettext

[yarbo]

GNU gettext

Surprised this has taken so long

[doodlelogic]

I remember our school in London had RM Nimbus 186s (yes, they were sold in a few computers) with Hindi, Gujurati, Urdu and Punjabi wordprocessing - in 1989!

These computers were too basic even to run early Windows.