[Indic-computing-users] Localization Newsletter Issue 2 Vol 1 (May 15, 2004)

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* Localization Newsletter Issue 2 Vol 1 (May 15, 2004) *
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Editor speak
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    We are happy to bring out long pending 2nd issue of Localization
newsletter. We haven't seen any major activities/release in past
month, big news being that Gujarati now joins the list of supported
Indian languages in GNOME, the other languages are Bengali and
Punjabi. Some activity has started for Oriya and Telugu in last few
weeks. An Oriya font is being developed and Telugu KDE translations
have started.

Headlines
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    * Gujarati is the next language to be fully supported in GNOME 2.6
. Nirav Mehta and his team at Magnet-i have completed 95% of Gnome 2.6
essentials.
    * KDE is now 93% translated to Hindi, a live CD based on KDE 3.2.x
is in the making, to be released by May end.

News Bits
---------

* Converters from ISCII to UNICODE available.
Surekha and Raghavan (su...@se... and
rag...@se...) start as Sarai FLOSS fellows investigating and
developing Indic tool-set necessary for web-applications built using
server side Java, to provide a platform independent interaction in a
browser based environment. ?CodeConverters is a Java tool for
converting text between ISCII, UNICODE and WX (alphabetic) for
DEVANAGARI and TELUGU scripts. These conversions can be extended to
other Indian Scripts. Why do we need this Converter? In JRE 1.4.1, the
Devanagari Character 'Nukta' when encountered in any text throws an
exception. This is a bug in JRE 1.4.1. This tool handles the exception
and consistently converts ISCII encoded text to Unicode and
vice-versa. This converter tool is available at
http://www.sarovar.org/projects/codeconverters.

* Input Method for Devanagari Script available.
Using the Java Input Method Framework, an IME for Devanagari
(DevanagariIM_wx.jar), which uses keyboard layout based on 'WX'
Notation, is available with the Java Unicode Editor at
http://www.sarovar.org/projects/javaeditor

* Oriya Font in development.
Rajesh Pradhan says he has started work on making Opentype Oriya fonts
from the Akruti Oriya ttf fonts. He has already made a Unicode ones of
it. Download http://www.indlinux.org/oriya/oriyafont.zip to try it
out. More on Oriya localization is available at
http://www.indlinux.org/wiki/index.php/OriyaLog

* Fedora Core 2 and Indic Language support
Support for Bengali/Bangla has been added to installer of the upcoming
Fedora Core 2 distribution. According to Jeremy Katz, Hindi, Punjabi
and Tamil are also sufficiently translated, but not enabled by default
as no fonts for the scripts for those languages are shipping with
Fedora Core 2.
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2004-April/msg00058.html

* Phonetic Indic keymaps
If you found typing in Indian languages using Inscript keyboard
difficult and wished for a simpler roman like one, here is your
saviour. Dr. G. Nagarjuna <nagarjun at hbcse.tifr.res.in> from HBSCE,
TIFR, Mumbai announces availability of phonetic input methods for
Indic, developed by project students from Indira Gandhi College of
Engineering, New Mumbai. They can be downloaded from
http://www.gnowledge.org/Data/Objects/kblayout/keymaps.phonetic.tar.gz
. These keymaps are based om Xmodmap and settings are available for
use with GNOME desktop. Additional help if necessary can be had from
http://www.gnowledge.org/Data/Objects/kblayout

* Another Inscript Keymap for Devanagari
Dave.J.Holl has made available a Hindi inscript Layout for XKB, which
has support for ZWNJ at http://www.smyrph.net/david/projects/inscript

Team watch: Gujarati translators steam ahead
--------------------------------------------

Nirav Mehta is a businessman with a heart. The young, 24year old
entrepreneur was inspired to take up the challenge of translating open
source software to Gujarati after seeing the IndLinux Milan Hindi
interface that was launched at GNUnify 2003 held in Pune last year.

"We use Linux in our operations and saw an opportunity to contribute
to the community. Gujarati is my mother tongue, so I took up the task
of doing Gujarati translations," says Mehta. The most notable part of
the Gujarati localization effort is the efficiency, speed and
cost-effectiveness with which the translations have been implemented.

Mehta's company, Magnet Web Publishing Pvt. Ltd is a 100 percent
export oriented unit that employs 35 people and uses PHP extensively.
Magnet hired seven interns from engineering colleges and this team
worked full-time on the translations. The GNOME translation was done
in a record time of one-and-half months and subsequently the team
translated around 25,000 strings of Open Office.

The sharp businessman that he is, all this was achieved at a
comparatively low cost of approximately Rs 28,000. Each intern was
paid a stipend of Rs 1,000 and Magnet employed seven interns for a
period of four months. A target-oriented task master, Mehta divided
the interns into teams of two people each and set targets for each
team. A blog was set up on the internal server to monitor the progress
of the translations. Once the translations were done, Mehta selected
the best two translators from the seven member team and assigned them
the responsibility of testing, quality analysis and bug fixes.

One unique feature of the Gujarati translation effort (as compared to,
say, the Hindi translation effort) is that all the translators were
located in the same place. Mehta says that this had many advantages.
"Communication levels were high, so problems were fixed faster. We did
not have to send mail to a list and wait for the feedback. Above all,
we had a lot of fun doing the translations."

The Gujarati team now plans to translate Mozilla, Evolution and other
applications. Mehta is putting together a business plan and has
identified over 30 business opportunities for Gujarati computing.
Gujarati Linux distributions, training, Indian language applications
for Linux, matrimonial sites in Gujarati, community portals, Unicode
enabling of web sites, etc are some of the business opportunities that
he has identified. He feels that the Gujarati Linux Distribution will
find a market with end users, government and educational institutions,
and companies based in non-metro cities. "In non-metros, people still
use their mother tongue as the language of business, so that's a
market that's not been addressed by IT vendors. Non Resident Indians
are another market because they want their children to be familiar
with the Gujarati language," says Mehta.

Mehta sums up his effort by saying that there is a business
opportunity in reaching the masses with the Gujarati Linux
distribution. "But this is more than a business. It also has a social
benefit attached to it!"

Nirav Mehta can be contacted at <nirav at magnet-i.com>

Help ..F1
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* Volunteers needed for Telugu localization.
Telugu is the considered the 2nd most widely spoken language after
Hindi in India, but ironically the least localized. A Telugu Opentype
font Pothana2000 is available under GNU GPL. It works well in KDE, but
needs further testing in GNOME. Translation work is also to be taken
up.
Current log of activity is at http://www.indlinux.org/telugu/
To volunteer join Telugu mailing list at
http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/indlinux-telugu

* Debian Project needs volunteers
A new mailing list has been created for co-ordination of efforts of
volunteers. Please drop in and see if you can volunteer and make
Debian better!
http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/debian-in-workers/2004-April/000000.html

Editor(s) - G Karunakar <karunakar at freedomink dot org>, Sankarshan
Mukhopadhyay (sankarshan at softhome dot net).
This document can be copied, redistributed verbatim only (c)
IndLinux.org 2004.