Archive for the ‘Gujarati’ Category

A FUEL for Gujarati Localization!

Wednesday, December 30th, 2009

Localization of Open Source Software into Gujarati language was started more than five years ago. Number of people joined the Gujarati localization efforts and many left. Every release of open source distributions like Fedora, Debian, OpenSuse got better localization into Gujarati. Despite continuous efforts by individuals or groups in Gujarati Localization there was no real 100% acceptance of many translations. Even today there is no 100% satisfaction in the Gujarati end users’ group for localized Gujarati distributions.

Similar issue has been faced by other (Indic) languages as well. FUEL (Frequently Used Entries for Localization) project was started by Mr. Rajesh Ranjan from Red Hat as a part of the community contribution to overcome the above mentioned issue. FUEL project is a community project initiated by Red Hat. It is hosted on fedorahosted.org. FUEL tries to provide a standardized and consistent computer interface for users. FUEL evaluation has been successfully completed for Hindi, Maithili, Marathi and Tamil languages before Gujarati. More information regarding FUEL can be found here: https://fedorahosted.org/fuel/

FUEL Evaluation workshop for Gujarati was organized on 26th – 27th December, 2009 in Ahmedabad @ Infineon Infotech Pvt. Ltd. office, where participants from Gujarati Localization group and Linguists from Ahmedabad have taken part. Participants were:

* Mr. Siddharath Bhatt (Linguist)
* Mr. Prashant Dave (Linguist)
* Mr. Yogendra Vyas (Linguist)
* Mr. Ketan Upadhyay (Department of Languages in Gujarat Govt.)
* Ms. Maitri Shah (Infineon Infotech Pvt. Ltd.)
* Ms. Shruti Amin (Infineon Infotech Pvt. Ltd.)
* Ms. Sweta Kothari (Red Hat Inc.)
* Mr. Ankit Patel (Red Hat Inc.)
* Ms. Deval Vyas (Infineon Infotech Pvt. Ltd.)
* Ms. Padma Jadav (Infineon Infotech Pvt. Ltd.)
* Ms. Sumaiya Vohra (Infineon Infotech Pvt. Ltd.)

First day, 26th December, started around 10:15 AM with a round of introduction and then I provided a generic idea about the FUEL, since it was a new thing for many of the participants. By 11 AM we were ready to start the evaluation of Gujarati translation of FUEL entries. Sweta and Maitri began to take us through FUEL entries. Initially it used to take lot of time for each FUEL entry, since the terms are based on computer terminology and it’s difficult for us to explain them practically each and every word, as language experts were not really used to computers. In the first two hours we did complete not more than 15 fuel entries, while our goal was to complete all 578 entries of FUEL within two days. Mr. Ketan Upadhyay has played a major role there to explain things in a better way that experts understand. We all were really amazed by suggestions from Mr. Prashant Dave and Mr. Siddharth Bhatt when they started bringing new better translation words and explained us some grammatical rules to remember while translating from English. We were taking reference of Saarth Dictionary and Mr. Ratilal Chandaria’s website GujaratiLexicon.com for clarifying some doubts. By 6 PM we were done with evaluation of 248 entries. But we knew that it’s going to be faster next day, since the rhythm of evaluation has already come in and everybody was on the same track.

Next day Mr. Yogendra Vyas, who is another great linguist, joined us for the evaluation. It has become an easy and quick next day since we had already gone through single word translation evaluation and now it’s time to complete two words and three words translation evaluation, where majority of the single words were common. So, we just needed to pick-up the translations from earlier evaluated words. Moreover, Mr. I Felix, who is the member of the FUEL upstream project provided contextual information for each FUEL entry. That has made our job little easy. End of the day, we were done with evaluation of all 578 entries of FUEL.

During the event, we realized that there were some words which are not really commonly used, but difficult for the end users to understand. So, FUEL entries has to be revised as well in my opinion. Another thing we noticed that, some words in English itself are improper at their usage location, which needs to be addressed and resolved. Standardization towards English words is necessary.

At last we discussed the strategy to implement the evaluated translations into the existing work. Under the wonderful co-ordination from Ms. Maitri Shah has helped us to complete the event successfully on schedule.

FUEL evaluated translations for Gujarati is available from fuel-gujarati page: https://fedorahosted.org/fuel/wiki/fuel-gujarati

In simple words, it was a great event for Gujarati Localization community and evaluated translations going to play an important role for future localization activities. Hats of to all who participated in the event and spend their precious time and efforts to make Gujarati Localization better through FUEL evaluation workshop!

Some snaps of the event:
Infineon Infotech Pvt. Ltd
Mr. Prashant Dave
Mr. Siddharth Bhatt and Mr. Ketan Upadhyay
FUEL Gujarati participants
FUEL Gujarati participants

/Ankit

Posted in Gujarati, Localization | No Comments »

Gujarati locale and standards…

Monday, June 15th, 2009

Few years before I have got a chance to modify the Gujarati locale file, which was initially created by Karunakar. Since the locale file plays a very important role in computer localization for any language, it was really important task for me. So, I had to make sure that any kind of change I make to this file is very accurate. After taking reference from Dictionaries I had entered the appropriate entries in the locale file.

Since last couple of days, there has been a discussion happening on Indlinux-group mailing list for issues posted against Gujarati locale. Issues were basically posted by French guy called Bernard, who can speak fluent Hindi and can read Gujarati to some extent. I felt really good when I saw the initial posting, since I found someone apart from the existing localization contributors, interested in Gujarati localization.

The major issues highlighted in the discussions were:
1. Rupee symbol in Gujarati locale
=> According to Bernard and few others as well, Rupee symbol should be “રૂ” rather than “રુ” or “૱”.
=> I have done my secondary, higher secondary education in pure Gujarati medium and used or seen “૱” only.
=> Unicode chart also points to the rupee symbol for Gujarati as “૱” (U+0AF1)
=> have taken a reference from SSC (10th) Maths Question Book from Gujarat Secondary and Higher Secondary Education Board website: http://www.gseb.org/gseb/download/student/question-bank/gujarati-medium/std-10/Maths.pdf – Page no. 12, 13. Maths_PDF.p65
2. Translation of Thursday into Gujarati
=> Thursday translates to “ગુરુવાર” in Gujarati. But here the spelling should be “ગુરૂવાર” according to Bernard.
=> There is no fault from Bernard’s side since the calendar that he sees at home displays “ગુરૂવાર”.
=> In fact when I was editing the Gujarati locale file initially, I also assumed that the spelling should be “ગુરૂવાર”. But I had to refer to the standards, dictionaries, etc. and I realized that the correct spelling is “ગુરુવાર”.

Last weekend I got a chance to visit my hometown Bilimora. While reading newspaper (Gujarat Samachar), I have noticed they have also been using wrong symbol for Rupee (રૂ|.) and Thursday ( ગુરૂવાર ). Same wrong spelling for Thursday I found in a calendar at my house from Gujarat Samachar. You can see that here:

Wrong_Calendar

There was another calendar in my bedroom :)

Correct_Calendar

So, I think the print media has been using wrong spellings for some words, which creates a confusion among users and they tend to use wrong words which they have been seeing often.

I am not a Gujarati linguist, but I have done my school study from Gujarati medium and know Gujarati upto well extent. I have modified the locale file according to the definitions provided in the Dictionaries and standards. However, this discussion needs an authentic verification from a language expert.

Thank you for reading!
Ankit

Posted in Gujarati, Localization | 2 Comments »