Hello,
As you can guess from my name, I'm not Indian. I'm French and I'm living
in France. My mother tongue is French but I also speak and read/write
fluent English and Hindi, and I understand Gujarati to some extent.
My wife is Gujarati and knows Gujarati and Hindi, and a little French.
I believe people should always be able to do everything in their
language, that's why I'm interested in FUEL.
The reason for my writing this e-mail is I don't like the very large use
of English in current translations into Indian languages (at least Hindi
and Gujarati, I guess it's the same for all Indo-Aryan languages, but
I'm not sure for Dravidian). There are a lot of translations which are
in fact transliterations from English.
Maybe the question is : do we translate to make Indians already using
computers able to use them in Indian languages, or to make computer use
available to non-English speakers?
Most Indians who currently use computers know English and do it entirely
in English. That's why, I guess, using non-English technical words feel
weird to them and they end up using pure English terms. However such
words remain incomprehensible for most Indians, even when written in
native scripts.
I installed Gujarati Firefox for my wife (who makes use of computer and
Internet on a daily basis and is not bad at it, she types in Hindi and
Gujarati to look for things in google for instance), but she often
doesn't understand what Firefox tells her because important words are
just English words. Some of these words already have nice equivalents
in Gujarati, and some other could be translated by neologisms that would
be understood far more easily than English words.
It seems to me that you're ashamed of using native Indian words in
computer science (and other sciences), but you shouldn't. Here in France
almost nobody would use computers if it made necessary to learn English.
Most computer users don't even know the meaning of "computer". They only
know what an "ordinateur" is. The same way, they use a "souris" (the
word for the little animal, as in English) to clic and a "clavier" (the
part of a piano that has keys) to type. We also never use words such as
"file", "window", "bookmark", "tab", "shortcut", "filter", "desktop",
"download" or "configure".
Once again, according to me, if the goal is to make computers usable by
non-English speakers, stopping using so much English is mandatory.
--
Bernard Massot