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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"
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.