Hi,
First post in the blog world !
Somewhere in November 2003, I and my college friends (Ankur Patel, Atit Shah, Bhavin Shah and Sweta Kothari) visited Mumbai, heart of India, in search of a software company, which can accommodate us as a software interns and guide us to work on some good software project. That was my first visit to Mumbai, a metro city in which life is very fast that’s what my friends and people told. I managed to figure out why the life in metro is fast, after traveling in the Mumbai Local Trains & Buses. That was an awesome experience and fun too! There is lot more to talk about Mumbai, which I am not going to do now, even the entire book won’t be sufficient to describe Mumbai and life in Mumbai.
After reaching to Mumbai, the first place for us to visit is Magnet-i, where Atit, Bhavin, Sweta and Khushbu were already invited for the interview. Me and Ankur has to search for another company to do our internship training. Luckily, Mr. Nirav Mehta, the CEO of Magnet group, had given a chance to me and Ankur too to sit for an interview. It was surprising as well as good opportunity too for both of us to face the interview. Interview has started and my performance was very bad, as couldn’t speak in English as fluent as others. And finally, except me all others got selected immediately. But, we were a group since college and wanted to work together. So, my friends, who got selected, requested the CEO to allow me also in the internship, and at the same time I added “I can do programming very well”. Mr. Nirav looked at me and told, “Congratulations, you can join us too!”. Yo hoo!
Now, after getting selected for the internship trainee, we have been explained about the project, Linux Localization, on which we have to work and we have been asked to read about it before actually joining for the internship training. Just like other college dudes, we also did nothing… 
We were completely blank on the day of joining, 5th January 2004. Now, the task assigned to us, was to read the websites like www.indlinux.org , www.indictrans.org , etc, and understand the Localization on Linux & processes. The links given to us, were pretty much helpful and we figured out the concept of Localization and it’s processes within a week. Still, we were not clear about the broader picture of the Localization, and to get that idea, Mr. Nirav has arranged a meet with Indlinux coordinator Mr. Karunakar, Prof. Jeetendra Shah & his team in Powai, Mumbai. We got lot of gyan about the broader picture of the project and translation tools like kbabel from Swapnil Hajare, Indictrans member. We saw, Rangoli Live CD too, brought by Mr. Karunakar. After this, we had a dinner party with all team members and Karunakar in Borivali, Mumbai. We began discussing Localization there too and picture of the project is getting more and more clear now. We learned about l10n, i18n, fonts, how to enable indic typing using xkb, .po files, po to mo conversion and test it on the gui. So, the process is very much clear to us. We started using Padma fonts, developed by indictrans team.
Now, it’s time for us to make a plan and implement it in our process. Bhavin Shah, who has a very good leading skills was selected as a Team Lead for our team. We were divided into separate groups. Translation team, Proof-reading team, Fonts team (which was formed in the mid of the project), Technical Team. So, Translation team does the translation and it’s being proof-read by the Proof-reading team. Even though we were divided into separate groups, we were rotating the responsibilities between these teams. So, everyone will have hands on experience of the entire process and the quality of the work we do becomes much better. Soon after a month, Kartik Mistry has joined our team, who used to be Nirav’s shool-mate. Now, we are members team. Btw, we have been asked to blog our daily progress too. Surprisingly, we have never heard the world Blog before that! We started blogging our progress, but it wasn’t as good as it should be and finally we couldn’t continue doing it.
Our first milestone to achieve the Linux Localization is to complete the Gnome 2.4 translations. The process for Gnome localization was pretty easy. We completed Gnome 2.4 translations within one and half month only, and that was a record at that time I think. But, soon the record was broken by Punjabi translation team, who completed the gnome translation within a month only! After completing Gnome translation, next target for us is to complete the very popular Linux Office suite, Openoffice.org Localization and following to it is the Localization of the most popular web browser, Firefox.
Openoffice.org Localization, has been very challenging task for us. It took almost a month for us to complete the translation and a month to get the localized build. There are quite a few good tips available too – http://www.khmeros.info/tools/localization_tips.html , which can help in Openoffice.org localization. Somehow, we achieved it too!
During the same period when some of the team members working on Openoffice, Khushbu and Ankur created a nice looking Gujarati font. It was named as Rekha font. That’s my mother’s name!
Next task, Firefox Localization, for which we didn’t have enough time left to work on, as our internship training period was about to over in the month of May. So, we started working on creating Live CD, which can be presented into our college and our college professors as our project. Live CD we created was based on Morphix. A manual that helped us is: http://www.morphix.org/doc/how_tos/docbook_html/index.html . Finally, we were ready with the Live CD, which runs directly into Gujarati language in Linux Operating system based on Morphix. After spending lot of time on deciding the name, finally we named the project Utkarsh… Now, it’s in local news paper, midday – http://www.utkarsh.org/images/midday_article.jpg . 27th May 2004, we had an official launch of the project. Gujarati Live CD – Utkarsh version 0.1 is launched by Shri Kanti Bhatt, a well known Gujarati writer.
After finishing the internship in May 2004, Khushboo, me and Kartik continued working in Magnet-i.com on the same project. Now, we were no more college students, but an employees working in a reputed software company, Magnet-i.com. Style of working has been changed, professionalism started developing into us. In the next month, June 2004, we got a call from Red Hat, a dream company for any Linux person, for an interview, for the post of a Technical Translation. Mr. Satish Mohan from Red Hat conducted an interview, and I got selected! I joined Red Hat Pune in July 2004.
Now the real journey of Localization has started. Started understanding the word Open source. Started working on as many open source projects as possible and Localized many applications. Worked on XFCE localization, Firefox/Thunderbird Localization, xchat, realplayer translations, etc. In June 2006, I started a project called IndianOSS, the purpose for it is same, Localization!
So, this is how I entered into the Localization World!
nice post mate!
keep it up your good work