Internationalization that hits a home run (personally)..;-)
Posted : May 12, 2004 at 7:45 pm [America/Los_Angeles]
The last time I checked, I, like many others who were born and brought up in India, knew three or more languages fairly well. In my case, these are Hindi, Bengali and English. I am obviously discounting the many computer languages that I think I know equally well if not better 
. However, thanks to reasons better left for the intellectuals and the historians to figure out, English turned out to be the language that dominated the others throughout my schooling and higher studies. Needless to say, the last 9-odd years of stay here in US has not helped the cause of these other languages.
What has all this got to do with i18n and home run, you ask? Well, thanks to this interesting comment posted by Pankaj on my dad’s blog this morning, I decided it was time to see if I could actually read and write on my WinXP using a language other than English. Well, after a few hours of surfing around, I was successful in writing a few words in Hindi on MSWord. It was a pain, but not as much as I thought. Here are the details for folks who would like to give it a whirl:
Sites that helped:
Softwares installed:
- Additional stuff from WinXP CD to install support for complex scripts and left-to-right Language.
- Mangal font (screenshot)
- Indic IME 1 (v 5.0) - (Supports Tamil, Kannada, Gujarati and Hindi Scripts)
Installation instructions:
This one was the best
Does that mean I will be busy refreshing my Hindi language skills versus Java/Perl/Python language skills? Except for my Maa, I can’t see anybody paying me a dime to learn Hindi. Look Maa, I can type in Hindi 
Anyway, it sure was fun dabbling in a language that I was pretty good at once upon a time.
In case you are wondering, the first line basically spells my full name and the second can be roughly translated as “Hail, Java”. Ok, that was a bad translation but you get the idea
- Anand
Category: Personal
1 Comment
hi Anand,
I did the same: but in Kannada. And yes, i was thrilled and had fun.
True, right now, i am in a stage where i don’t see myself using Kannada on my PC. But i have folks in small towns, and friends in villages who are intimidated by the word PC, since though educated they are not so fluent with English.
I am going gift my nephew a PC with Kannada installed, this new year.
Hail Kannada on PC’s
Girija
Posted by: Girija at November 17, 2004 @ 4:06 am