Dear Bernard,

On Sun, Dec 20, 2009 at 11:42 PM, Bernard Massot <bmassot@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