In a bid to overcome problems posed by difficult Hindi words, Government has asked section officers to use their ” hinglish” replacements for easy understanding and better promotion of the language.

official circular here.

Excuse me while I whoop with joy for a moment here. Reason being, its a clear endorsement of something that I have forever followed in Bengali (India) Translations. I have argued, fought and have been ocassionally berated for not coming up with innovative Bengali words for the various technical terminology that I have translated. My steady answer has been something to the tune of – ‘don’t fix it, if it ain’t broken’.

At conferences and other places when I used to interact with people who had suddenly taken an interest in localization, they were often pretty upset that things like ‘files‘, ‘keyboards‘, ‘cut‘, ‘print‘ etc. were simply translitered in Bengali. (I am sure they did not hold very high opinions about the bunch of Bengali localizers.) So we got suggestions like – “you could consider translating ‘paste’ as ‘লেপন’ “(similar to গোবর লেপা, i suspect), or “you need to write মুদ্রণযন্ত in place of a printer“. There were more bizarre examples, which were more like words constructed with several other words (for things like URL, UTC etc.). I held my ground at that time, and hopefully this announcement has at last put my doubts (well, I did have second thoughts about whether I was being too adamant while “compromising authenticity for practicality“) to rest.

After getting the necessary i18n bits fixed, Bengali localization for desktop applications primarily came about around circa 2000. However, computer usage among the Bengali speaking/reading population has been happening for decades before that. By the time the first few desktop applications started to peek through in Bengali, there already were a good many users who had familiarized themselves with the various terms on the desktop. Users were well-familiar with:

• ‘clicking‘ on ‘buttons‘, or
• going to a link, or
• ‘printing‘ a ‘document‘,
• ‘cutting‘ and ‘pasting‘,
• ‘pointing‘ with a ‘mouse‘ etc.

Subjecting them to barely relatable or artifically constructed terms would have squeezed in another learning phase. It just did not make sense.

In response, the other question that creeped in was – ‘then why do you need to localize at all?‘ It is a justified query. Especially in a place like India, which inherited English from centuries of British rule. However, familiarity with a language is not synonymous to comfort. Language has been a hindrance for many things for ages. Trying to read a language, one is not fully comfortable with can be a cumbersome experience. For eg. I can speak and understand Hindi quite well, but lack the fluency to read it. Similarly, there were a good number of people who did not learn English as their primary language of communication[1]. Providing a desktop which people can read faster would have gotten rid of one hurdle that had probably kept away a lot of potential users.

There were also people who knew the terms indirectly, perhaps someone like a clerk in the office who did not handle a computer but regularly needed to collect printouts from the office printer. This group of people could mouth the words but did not read them often and if the language on the desktop was not the primary language of everyday business, they probably did not even know what the word looked like. When getting them to migrate their work desks to a desktop, it is essential to ensure that the migration is seamless and gave prime importance to the following:

• Familiar terms should not be muddled up, and
• Readability of the terms is not compromised

Point 1 is also required to ensure that the terminology is not lost in translation when common issues are discussed across geographies and locales. For eg. in institutes of higher education or global business houses. Getting it done by integrating transliterated terminology for highly technical terms that were already in prevalence seemed like the optimum solution. It has not worked badly for Bengali (India) localization so far. We have been able to preserve a high quality of consistency across desktop applications primarily because the core technical terminology never needed to be artificially created, which also allows new translators (already familiar with desktops in most cases) to get started without too much groundwork.

Note: it is not unusual to find people in India speak fluently in 2-3 languages and not always in a pure form of any. Mixing words from several languages while conversing is quite a prevalent practice these days.

In some kind of graphical representation, that is probably what our country looks like. A montrosity thats bursting at its seams, waiting to spill out its contents and held together by a network of flimsy patches at various places. Yet, it stays in place. Just like inside those old buildings, people carry on with their lives nonchalantly. More as an existential pattern they have known for a lifetime. Any alternative is unknown or doesn’t seem to work (and i am guessing here) mostly due to a lack of familiarity. With a billion other people to fight against for a share of food, jobs, a berth on the train and everything else, life as we know it here in India is a constant challenge that most of us don’t really sign up for, but nevertheless accept because otherwise we may risk losing what we have managed to gather.

What breaks this mad rush are incidents induced by nature’s fury or misguided human fury. Like the other day. Bombs, in Mumbai (yet again). What followed was the usual round of calling up friends, family and other folks to check if things were ok. When things settled without the detection of any cause for alarm, one could divert their attention to the messages of wrath that started pouring on various timelines. Some called for an attack on the perpetrators, while others lamented upon the lack of tooth and nail within the general populace. Honestly, even I have felt the same way, when accosted by a situation grave enough to rattle me in some way. However, in most other cases I prefer to maintain a reserve. Not because I do not empathize, but rather I have inherited a trait from a parent who describes it as – unless there is a fully informed solution that has any practical implementation in a conducive environment, it is never a good idea to ramble opinions about sensitive matter. Well.. not in gentle company atleast.

A lot of people have questioned the effectiveness of our intelligence agencies and how porous our defences are that terrorists can make a serious attack with the least of efforts. Personally, I am not in a position or informed enough to provide a serious analysis of where the failure was and how things could be strengthened. Instead what I see is an unmanageable chaos. Stop for a moment and look around. What you’ll see is a unstructured mass – not just of tangible objects like people, vehicles, buildings, but a carefully nurtured cultural shroud that binds all of these. Call it rich Indian heritage, difference in castes, inequality of the classes, regional biases, the all encompassing ‘jugaad’ – in short the cultural fibre that dictates how the people of the land live with each other. And one of the things that rarely finds itself on this list is perhaps ‘respect’.

Its probably hard to describe how thats a conclusion I can come up with, except for the various instances that I see around me. Being a microscopic instance of a billion+ population, it comes down essentially to the equation of demand and supply. The more in number, the more devalued it is. In this case human lives. No one really cares about another person, because they have to struggle to ensure that atleast that one human life still gets a bit of importance – their own. Stretch it maybe a little further to family, children, parents, someone-who-matters. As long as this coocooned bunch is taken care of, nothing else matters. Trains can burn, young children can beg, a hapless guard can be yelled at, plastic bottles can be thrown into rivers, walls can be defaced, red traffic signals can be run over, a bribe paid, examinations cheated, or the nextdoor neighbour called a racist vile term.

Seriously, where is that element of respect that drives a community to stand up with pride and reclaim its glory. I find it really funny when people mouth the cock and bull statements about a ‘country that is unified in its diversity’. Bull crap. Define diversity – the politically correct regional culture or things that create differences worse than plague – religious rigidity, caste based divisions, financial demarcations, occupational supremacy…you name it and we have it. There is always a reason to disrespect the other person standing next to you. How would anyone be able to collaborate with harmony with people they don’t feel good about? Even if its for their own safety? I seriously don’t know. These differences have been passed on for generations and I don’t see it changing very soon.

Its probably like working at a place where you don’t care much about the work, but you get your paycheck at the end of month and go home happy as long as you get to buy that perfect pair of shoes or a crate of poison. Well.. as long as the next bomb doesn’t get you.

The translators’ names are now kept/written in the PO files headers. It might take a while (hours) for all resources to be affected.

However, just to be sure it may be better to do a few trial runs first before restarting full fledged commits.

Along with that, .POT files have also been returned:

Users can now download POT file for PO based resources

(They may need locating though, could not find them yet One can get them as the ‘original .pot’ from the same dialog that is displayed when the language name/module is clicked on for online translation or download.)

More information about these may be coming in via the trac tickets: [1 ] [2]

That was total yayness! from the Transifex team. Thank you!

Explained better below:

Downloaded version from Transifex: (All original credits have been removed)

# SOME DESCRIPTIVE TITLE.
# Copyright (C) YEAR Red Hat, Inc.
# This file is distributed under the same license as the PACKAGE package.
# FIRST AUTHOR , YEAR.
#
msgid “”
msgstr “”
“Project-Id-Version: Anaconda\n”
“Report-Msgid-Bugs-To: http://bugzilla.redhat.com/\n”
“POT-Creation-Date: 2011-05-06 14:41-0400\n”
“PO-Revision-Date: 2011-05-06 18:08+0000\n”
“Last-Translator: clumens \n”
“Language-Team: Bengali (India) \n”
“MIME-Version: 1.0\n”
“Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8\n”
“Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n”
“Language: bn_IN\n”
“Plural-Forms: nplurals=2; plural=(n != 1)\n”

Local Update (with manual addition of past credits):

# translation of anaconda.master.po to Bengali INDIA
# Bangla INDIA translation of Anaconda.
# Copyright (C) 2003, 2004, Red Hat, Inc.
# This file is distributed under the same license as the anaconda package.
#
# Deepayan Sarkar , 2003.
# Jamil Ahmed , 2003.
# Progga , 2003, 2004.
# Runa Bhattacharjee , 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011.
# Runa Bhattacharjee , 2007.
# Runa Bhattacharjee , 2008, 2009, 2011.
msgid “”
msgstr “”
“Project-Id-Version: Anaconda\n”
“Report-Msgid-Bugs-To: http://bugzilla.redhat.com/\n”
“POT-Creation-Date: 2011-05-06 14:41-0400\n”
“PO-Revision-Date: 2011-05-12 11:51+0530\n”
“Last-Translator: Runa Bhattacharjee \n”
“Language-Team: Bengali (India) \n”
“MIME-Version: 1.0\n”
“Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8\n”
“Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n”
“Language: bn_IN\n”
“Plural-Forms: nplurals=2; plural=(n != 1)\n”
“X-Generator: Lokalize 1.1\n”

Commited version on Transifex ( credit and user information deleted again by Transifex after the local updated file was committed):

# SOME DESCRIPTIVE TITLE.
# Copyright (C) YEAR Red Hat, Inc.
# This file is distributed under the same license as the PACKAGE package.
# FIRST AUTHOR , YEAR.
#
msgid “”
msgstr “”
“Project-Id-Version: Anaconda\n”
“Report-Msgid-Bugs-To: http://bugzilla.redhat.com/\n”
“POT-Creation-Date: 2011-05-06 14:41-0400\n”
“PO-Revision-Date: 2011-05-12 06:27+0000\n”
“Last-Translator: runa \n”
“Language-Team: Bengali (India) \n”
“MIME-Version: 1.0\n”
“Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8\n”
“Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n”
“Language: bn_IN\n”
“Plural-Forms: nplurals=2; plural=(n != 1)\n”

All this while, none of us worked on Fedora 15 modules waiting for a resolution. A query to Fedora Legal is also waiting to be answered. After some discussions to review the current status of things, it was decided to stop translation work for Bengali-India for all Fedora modules until this situation is rectified in some way or the legal status of things is established with clarity. We have earlier been victims of credit related violations, and feel very strongly about it and would not like to endorse similar violations in any way.

This has been filed as a ticket and is being worked upon by the Transifex team.

Meanwhile, I am trying to keep a record of all the past credits (Bengali & Bengali-India translators) for all the Fedora modules translated for Bengali-India. It may take a little time to track them through the upstream repositories as a lot of modules have already gotten updated into their respective repositories with stripped .PO files (due to automatic merges/updates).

The title for this post is derived from the now (in)famous twitter hashtag that came about after a tweet from a ‘well-known’ Indian blogger.

…

Rangrez Mere from Tanu Weds Manu – sung by the Wadali Brothers

(There could be spelling errors as I am not much familiar with the written form of Hindi)

— Jodi Picoult (My Sister’s Keeper)

The damned lies statistics page was redone to display a reduced number of strings. So teams, could choose to avoid unnecessary strings and work on the ones that would be more prominent on the user interface. Thats good news. Both the total and reduced string statistics for the user interface are now displayed on the status pages. However, what somehow escaped my notice is that the ‘reduced’ string count percentage on the front page (80%)…,

…differs from the number on the Ui-part page (76%)

As a result, while I was quite happy to move on to some other pressing matters with a supported status under the belt, turns out the joke’s on me this time.

Instead of the arbitrary string count statistics as a criteria for  Supported Status, personally I’d rather like something on the lines of what KDE marks as the ‘Essential Packages’. Friedel explains it much better though.

So until the time GNOME decides to rethink on its Supported Status criteria, I guess I’ll just need to gear up to face the string nazi for v 3.2