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]

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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]

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]

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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]

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.