Friday, March 28, 2008

Business Standard launches BSHindi.com

Business Standard has released a Hindi business news website "BSHindi.com" as an extension to its Hindi business newspaper that was launched in February 2008. “The idea behind launching a Hindi website is to make Hindi business news available through every possible medium. Many business owners in India access the Internet to get trading related information and a lot of them are more comfortable getting the information in Hindi as compared to English.”, said Arun Natesh, Head, marketing, Business Standard.

The site is currently offering business news related to the stock markets, companies, economy and investments sourced from Business Standard and news agencies such as Reuters, Bloomberg and PTI. There is a dedicated section for regional business news, which covers areas such as Lucknow, Bhopal, Jalandhar and Ludhiana. [Read full story]

Thursday, March 27, 2008

Google Docs/Apps add Indian Language Support

Google Docs in Google Apps now supports all popular local languages of India including Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, Marathi and Oriya. [Read full story]

Monday, March 24, 2008

US headhunts Hindi teachers

Some schools in the US have decided to introduce Hindi as a foreign language with staples like French, Spanish and German. "We're going to teach our kids how to speak important languages. We will welcome teachers here to help teach our kids how to speak languages," US President George Bush had said during a National Security Language Initiative in New York.

With an initial budget of $114 million, this initiative aims at helping more Americans to become multilingual. Arabic, Mandarin, Russian, Persian and Hindi are all "important languages". Instructors are being recruited to teach these from kindergarten right up to the university level. In India, the recruitment process is being facilitated by an arm of the human resources development ministry, called EdCIL (Education Consultants India Limited). [Read full story]

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Govt to launch 700cr National Translation Mission

To enable easy use of Hindi in Government offices the Commission for Scientific and Technical Terminology (CSTT) plans to launch a website that will auto-translate English words (we fail to understand though how will this help quick translation, but then this is GOI). Also on the anvil is an ambitious 700 cr "National Translation Mission" (don't get too excited, this is yet to be approved by the planning commission).

The 5 year mission is aimed at creating Hindi translation from famous works in English and other foreign languages with subject matter ranging from Economics to Geography, History and Science & Technology. CSTT claims to have created standard Hindi Terminology for about 9 lacs English words and 6 lacs words from Kannada, Konkani, Bodo and Oriya in its 37 year term.

Commendable work, but we wonder if it has found any real-world application. Yet for the sake of Hindi we hope CSTT succeeds. [Read the full story in Hindi]

Monday, March 17, 2008

Government ashamed of Hindi?

How do the Governments fare in having their websites? US, UK and Canada have done a very good job on this, they have websites for many important government departments. Joe Anderson thinks India and China have done a fairly good job on this but wonders why the recently launched Indian portal on disability, Punarbhav, is not in Hindi.

Sunday, March 16, 2008

Hear, Speak and Blog Sanskrit

Vishvavani is an online Sanskrit magazine published by a bunch of students of Indian origin from various US Universities. Blogging in Sanskrit is also gaining ground. While some like "Kalidasa", maintained by Ajit Krishnan, a software engineer at Seattle, covers a wide variety of topics, some like "Learn Sanskrit" maintained by Himanshu Pota from Australia focus on specific topics such as teaching Sanskrit, Sanskrit songs, grammar, words and wise sayings.

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Yanthram: another online Hindi search tool

Yanthram is a new entrant in online Hindi search. It is build upon Google search API and Indic Input integration. It means you can directly input Hindi (supports Kannada and Telugu too) in its search box. [Read a small review here (in Hindi)]

Sunday, March 9, 2008

Local flavour

Read how Hindi Granth Kaaryaalay in Mumbai is serving the dual purpose of a publishing house and bookstore for last forty years.

Friday, March 7, 2008

Internationalized Domain Names

The advent of Unicode started a new era in international computing. After that, Internationalized domain names seem to have a great potential for non-roman languages. Varun Aggarawal explains what internationalized domain names (IDNs) mean and what possibilities it has for Indian languages. [Read full story]

Thursday, March 6, 2008

DTL mulls Hindi feed; launches local show with fashion designer Manish

Lifestyle channel Discovery Travel and Living (DTL) is weighing the options of launching a Hindi feed in addition to its existing English feed. [Read full story]

When Indian parampara becomes Pakistani wordspeak

Indian television serials are part of everyday life in Pakistan and slowly changing everyday vocabulary with words like 'parivar', 'prarthana' and 'parivartan' creeping in. [Read full story]

Hindi and Chinese may dethrone English

US economist David Rosen said the official languages of the two emerging markets, India and China, will soon be the most preferred language in the workplace in coming times. David was also quoted as saying,
"What I feel is that it is time the education planners should start focusing on basic education rather than going overboard on the Indian Institutes of Technology and IT. Otherwise a paradigm shift from agrarian arena to other sectors will result in people lining up the streets with begging bowls."

Wednesday, March 5, 2008

BigAdda Launches Multilingual Messaging ...

Reliance's social networking portal BigAdda has launched multiple messaging: users can now post scraps in Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada. [Read full story].