Gujarati community (indianoss-gujarati(a)lists.sf.net) is more than happy to have new
contributors. Bug reports, are always welcome.
Btw, we will be having FUEL Gujarati meet soon. I will send invites to all interested when
we fix the dates and availabilities of the attendees.
Thanks!
Ankit
________________________________
From: Rajesh Ranjan <rajesh672(a)gmail.com>
To: fuel-discuss(a)lists.fedorahosted.org
Sent: Mon, 21 December, 2009 4:31:44 PM
Subject: Re: (ir)relevence of English words in translations
Dear Bernard,
On Sun, Dec 20, 2009 at 11:42 PM, Bernard Massot <bmassot(a)free.fr> wrote:
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.
Thanks for your interest in FUEL and writing all your views in detail.
>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.
It is a fact that here in India people use much English terms' transliteration in
translation.
The cause of the use is not really the non availability of terms in Indian language. At
least for Hindi that I know
there are valid and proper replacement for most of the general technical terms also.
Probably one of the main reason is our colonial past that resulted in large scale use of
English everywhere
and so the computer is also not an exception.
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?
This is important. We have seen English language interface and used to it.
So during translation, hangover of the habit of using English language desktop is also
coming in between and so the result can be like this...
But is it good...? Or is it an effort towards preparing a computer for non-English
speaker. I personally agree that to some extent accepting computer, desktop can be okay
but is there any need to transliterate configure, filter etc.? I am related to Hindi
localization and in Hindi also it is a fact.
Due to these reasons, FUEL tries to have a meet where participation of different type of
people can be ensured. Like, Linguist, computer user, translators, technical people,
journalists, general users etc. And so we try to be agree to one word that can be accepted
as "good" with the consensus of the people participating. Then the FUEL of any
language is released as evaluated. So for the good, democratic and acceptable result we
prefer to have a process like this though this process is very much resource hungry and
difficult to plan out.
And so, we have till now only completed evaluation of Hindi, Maithili, Marathi and Tamil.
Gujarati Evaluation is expected in near future and I hope that Gujarati community will try
to cover your points also in the meet.
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.
Here it would be better if any Gujarati community person can explain. But there is no harm
in saying that native/ Desi word can have greater appeal and understandability than
English for the non-English people.
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
Thanks again.
--
Regards,
Rajesh Ranjan
www.kramashah.blogspot.com
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