[Wikimediaindia-l] India, home to the largest spoken languages in the world: A localisation opportunity

[Arun Ram]

Hi Siebrand,

Thanks for reaching out.

I am keen to help in anyway I can in my spare time towards this (connecting
people), though my time is a bit constrained with few other commitments.

Happy to try and connect you with people, who may have skills to help in
some of these languages.

I agree it is important to spread the word and focus on getting more and
more localization done for languages spoken in India.

There are a few others who would be keen to assist. I can connect you to
them as well.

Regards
Arun

Bangalore, India
www.arunram.net | www.twitter.com/arunram


On Wedf t, Oct 7, 2009 at 8:53 PM, Siebrand Mazeland
<s.mazeland at xs4all.nl>wrote:

> Dear Wikimedians from India.
>
> For those who do not know me, I am a staff member of
> http://translatewiki.net, a project where most of the translation of
> MediaWiki is done. MediaWiki is the software used by all wikis of the
> Wikimedia Foundation. There is more to translatewiki, but I hope you may
> discover that later.
>
> I have made an analysis of the localization of MediaWiki and its extensions
> with regards to use by the Wikimedia Foundation. I have done this with a
> scope of the 50 languages with the most speakers in the world[1]. As India
> is an enormous country, with a long history, it is no surprise that many
> languages are spoken by a lot of people.
>
> For India the following languages make the top 50 of most spoken languages
> in the world: Hindi (3), Bengali (10), Gujarati (34), Kannada (33),
> Malayalam (39), Marathi (17), Nepali (43), Oriya (42), Punjabi (15), Sindhi
> (37), Tamil (28), Telugu (20), and Urdu (29). Some of these languages have
> a
> fair level of localization (Telugu and Hindi are doing OK, but not
> excellent), but many others have very poor localization (Oriya  and Urdu
> are
> doing particularly bad)[1].
>
> As I do not speak or read any languages that are not in a Latin, Greek or
> Cyrillic script, and live in the Netherlands, it is hard for me to crowd
> source translators for these languages. I am in dire need of structural
> help
> in that area. Having Wikimedia India formed is something I recognize as an
> enormous opportunity for getting the localization level of languages spoken
> in India to a higher level. It will enable more users to experience and
> enjoy the freedoms that we as Wikimedians try to create and provide.
>
> Please help me help in getting India's languages gain more ground and
> availability in the Wikimedia universe. Ideally I would like some kind of
> an
> ambassador from your community to spread the word and focus on getting more
> and more localization done for languages spoken in India. If you are
> interested in contributing as a translator, please visit translatewiki.net
> .
> If you are interested in investing time on a higher level, please contact
> me
> on-wiki, on this list, or by private e-mail so we can work something out.
> Any help is greatly appreciated.
>
> Thank you.
>
> Siebrand Mazeland
> translatewiki.net staff
>
> [1]
>
> http://translatewiki.net/wiki/Project:MediaWiki_localisation_in_the_50_most_
> spoken_languages
> [2] http://www.mediawiki.org
>
>
>
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