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

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

[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: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