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Linux to be Available in 13 Indian Languages

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the tux-meets-taj-mahal dept.

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"

2 of 32 comments (clear)

  1. Nice idea indeed by ilithiiri · · Score: 3, Informative

    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! ;)

    --
    If anyone can hear me, slap some sense into me But you turn your head, and I end up talking to myself
  2. Re:Interesting how it will work by pamri · · Score: 2, Informative
    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