Recently the founder of the world wide web commented that as long as the large population of non english speakers are away from the net, his invention stands worthless. And thats what is prompting big websites to look at Indian languages for more business.
The leader is google no doubt which has so far managed to provide search in 8 Indian languages apart from English. I tested the search in Marathi and everything looks great, for example when I typed ‘Abhil’ अà¤à¤¿à¤²à¤¾à¤¶à¤¾ showed up automatically which is simply great. For general users it might not sound that big but the technology behind it is simply superb.
So far the google translator only supports hindi, but other languages might be added very soon.
Before you try it out, let me warn you that this translator is not yet perfected, so you might get some really funny results at times. Used to translate sentences in this when we felt bored from work. Better than playing computer games, the translator comes up with some great jokes at times.
Example I translated this into from English to Hindi : “Salman Khan,Katrina Kaif to Break Up” and what i got back was “सलमान खान, Katrina कैफ को तोड़ने के लिठऊपर”.
Coming back to Internet and Indian Languages, its great to know that multinational companies are accepting Indian languages and spending lot of money to increase the net penetration mainly into rural India. How much these companies will actually succeed will have to be seen.
A nice software which can be downloaded for free from the Internet which enables you to write in Indian languages is Baraha which can be downloaded here. For ex: I only need to press F11 to change to Marathi and can type in Marathi and then again F11 to change to English. Other indian languages supported by Baraha are Kannada, Hindi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Gujurati, Punjabi, Bengali and Oriya.
Some of the other popular sites which are using the Indian language support are rediffmail.com, orkut.com, wordpress.com, blogger.com.
wow nice info about google search engine to non english speakers people nice post …
1/6th of the world’s population live in india and 70% of this 1/6 live in rural areas. That is a user base of around 700 mn (twice the population of US)…All the major software vendors eye a huge huge opportunity if they manage to penetrate into this virgin market…These companies would love to increase their user base in china too, but the problem is that china’s market is already captured by local chinese companies…The biggest search engine in China is http://www.baidu.com and not google. Infact, google is a small player in the chinese market and is finding it difficult to make inroads. They don’t want to make the same mistake by overlooking India. They want to capture this market before any local indian company…Only time will tell if they succeed.