# Opensource Fellowships and localization into Indic languages at SARAI


**Background**

![](http://www.sarai.net/logo.jpg)I somehow came across the homepage of
[Sarai](http://www.sarai.net/) about two years ago, while living in
Indonesia. I was extremely impressed with what I saw from their webpages
and mailing lists - a vibrant community space/collective that was
interested in many of the same things as me; urban issues in developing
countries, open source, open culture, national and regional languages
etc. They publish a ton of great writings, both in English and Hindi,
mostly available from their website, and I downloaded several [Sarai
Readers](http://www.sarai.net/publications/readers/) and enjoyed reading
their thoughts on urban development in Delhi, piracy culture, etc.

![](http://www.sarai.net/resolveUid/f1c64cafcf848794147dbf442fe7e0da)I
also subscribed to their newsletter, and every month I would get an
email telling my about the films they were showing and the talks they
were featuring, thinking it was such a pity that all this interesting
stuff was going on in Delhi, and I was stuck in Toronto… So when I was
finally going to India this summer, for the first time, I knew I wanted
to fit in a visit to Delhi, and to Sarai.

On Friday, having spent two days in Delhi being exhausted from avoiding
all the touts in Connaught Place, and walking around in the humidity, I
suddenly received an invitation from Sarai to a seminar where all their
Open Source Fellows would be presenting their projects. Sarai has been
using some of their own money, and also some money from Rajiv Gandhi
Foundation, to give fellowships for projects involving open source and
localization into Indian languages to groups around India. I was
extremely lucky to be able to attend this very interesting gathering,
and I learnt a lot from the people there. Here are some of the projects
that were presented.

**Introduction**

![](http://lh6.ggpht.com/shaklev/SJ_7IM9-h5I/AAAAAAAACPM/sLsrMjttEf0/s288/100_0440.JPG)Gora
Mohanty introduced Sarai’s involvement in FLOSS. Originally the
organization mainly focused on urban studies, but they needed tools to
publish in Indian languages, and originally their involvement was more
to “scratch an itch”. They currently have 40 open fellowships, and 10
specific FLOSS fellowships. Based on the experiences from this year,
they will try to provide more support to the fellows, and also promote
more interaction between the different fellows, in future years. A
question related to this is what collaboration technology to be used,
since for example IRC is very convenient for some, but scares others
away. (At the end of day one, I suggested having all the fellows blog,
and then aggregating all the blogs in a planet somewhere). One
experience they have gained is that technical people are often not the
best people to do localization work.

In general, the projects have had a very high success rate, partly
explained by the fact that the people who receive the fellowships are
often older and more established than for example the Google Summer of
Code participants, and have a track record of delivering.

Lately it has become much easier to get funding for doing FLOSS projects
in India, since the concept is becoming quite widely known, although
perhaps not so well understood by funding agencies still. There is also
more and more commercial activity in for example Hindi localization, and
many of the projects Sarai fund are more on the “edges”, involving
lesser spoken languages, etc.

An example was given of a workshop in Kashmir University, where 100
students showed up. Gora usually starts his presentations by asking how
many have used computers before, and then goes on to ask how many have
used Windows, etc. However, in this crowd only two people had ever used
computers at all before. Yet they came to the meeting and were eager to
get involved!

**KDE 4.2 localization**

![](http://bp0.blogger.com/_t-eJZb6SGWU/SE0k--HCB1I/AAAAAAAADN4/IK2pMv50y78/S220/raviratlami.JPG)[R.
Shrivastava](http://raviratlami.blogspot.com/) has been working on
localization of KDE 4.2. He also showed off how the KDE applications
work well running natively in Windows. We discussed a bit how to come up
with good terminology in Hindi, since there is a balance between simply
taking all the English words and spelling them in Devanagari (which is
what most cell phone ads in India seem to do), and on the other extreme
use obscure terms for downloading or computer that some government
agency has come up with, but which are very foreign to the users. He
explained that they had tried to strike a balance, using a language that
felt natural.

We also discussed what kind of tools could be used, especially to access
translation memories from other projects, and other languages. Many of
the Northern Indian languages are very similar, such as Hindi, Urdu,
Punjabi, Marathi, Bhojpuri and Nepali (although with some exceptions
written in different scripts). If one is doing a Hindi translation and
is stuck on a term, it might thus be useful to be able to quickly look
up how they translated it in Punjabi, etc. I am not sure if KBabel for
example has this functionality today - it would be useful for other
language groups as well, such as Norwegian, Swedish and Danish, or
Finnish and Estonian.

**Publishing in Indian languages using TeX**

![](http://lh3.ggpht.com/shaklev/SJ_4t1QUJ0I/AAAAAAAACOc/HcgUzNms7hc/s288/100_0419.JPG)Dr.
C. S. Yogananda is a professor of mathematics, and has often helped
arrange the math olympics. TeX is a publishing package that separates
content from display, and is especially often used in the sciences and
math, because it has powerful capabilities to display mathematical
formulas, etc.

He described how earlier versions of TeX available for Indian languages
required a pre-processor, but that he had developed a version that did
not, and was thus much easier to use. He has already developed a version
in Kannada, and believes that a one week workshop with participants from
different language groups would be enough to produce TeX packages for
all the Indian languages using the same framework.

He also discussed localization, and his own belief that mere translation
was not enough. He took as example [GCompris](http://gcompris.net), a
package of games for children, and talked about how localization implied
changing some games that Indian kids were not familiar with, updating
pictures to reflect Indian realities, changing maps so that they were
more relevant, etc.

He also talked about early Indian typewriters, stating that if they had
been designed from scratch only inspired by the Western models, instead
of taking Western models and keeping the same amount of keys, etc, just
exchanging for Indic language letters, people might have been much more
comfortable typing in Indic languages. (He gave an example from a
Supreme Court judge who told that previous to the typewriter, all court
deliberations had been in Kannada, but after the advent of the
typewriter, it had been so difficult to type in Kannada, that they had
switched to English). Even today there are apparently some issues in the
Unicode space for Kannada which also makes Kannada computing difficult.

They have been working on Kannada OCR, which is currently 95% finished.
Instead of using an existing framework, they started from scratch.
Hopefully this will be finished in another 6 months. Finally he showed
examples of a Kannada-English dictionary that had been produced using
their system, with thousands of pages, and all the indexing etc, using
the advanced functionality in TeX. As far as I understood, this
dictionary will later be released openly on the web, after a two year
exclusivity agreement with a publishing company has lapsed.

One thing that I found peculiar is that the entire input in the TeX
source files (which are later processed and turned into PDFs or other
output formats) is written not using a Kannada font, but in latin
letters - “transcribed”. He insisted that the system for input was
logical, and that they were able to input at high speed using this
system, but I thought to myself, what if India had invented the
computer, and somebody had forced me to input my latest Norwegian
poetry, or novel, using Norwegian transcribed into Devanagari alphabet?
This concept is still strange to me.

**Oriya lexicon**

![](http://lh3.ggpht.com/shaklev/SJ_4zVjimXI/AAAAAAAACO8/2FXVYBBFhgI/s288/100_0426.JPG)Dr.
N. M. Pattnaik started out with a fascinating history of dictionaries in
[Oriya](http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Oriya). The first dictionary dates
back to the 17th Century, and was written for poets. As such, the words
were alphabetized based on the last letters, not the first (to improve
rhyming), and the meanings of each word were given in a poem. In the
18th Century, missionaries started producing dictionaries and grammars
to aid them in their work, but these dictionaries were organized subject
wise. In 1916 the first etymological dictionary in Oriya appeared. Then,
between 1930 and 1940 a gigantic dictionary of 7 volumes and 10,000
pages was produced. This dictionary contained 185,000 head words, with
translations in English, Hindi and Bengali. Unfortunately, only 200
copies were sold, and most of the other copies were destroyed due to
rights disputes with the publisher and the heir.

This amazing dictionary, which is of course an incredibly important part
of the linguistic and cultural history, not just of Orissa, but all of
India, has been scanned and made available through Pattnaik’s
organization. They did it using very simple equipment - a digital camera
on a wooden stand, and a huge amount of manual editing and
post-processing. The resulting 600 MBs have not yet been put on the
internet, but I received a copy, and I will post it to archive.org as
soon as I am back in Canada in a few weeks (with good broadband).
Sneakernet across the world.

This dictionary represented the peak of Oriya dictionary making, and in
the small dictionaries published today, one cannot even find modern
words like nuclear or electron. There were also glossaries produced by
government committees, but these consisted of scientists that never used
Oriya in their own work, and were often were unnatural. In addition, the
committees were based on subject field, so a given word, used in many
subjects, might be translated differently in every committee.

His organization mainly works on making science fun for kids, and
believes that this has to be done in their own language. However,
scientists are often not very good in local languages (since most of
their education and work happens in English), and so they need good
lists of scientific terminology in Oriya and English.

Dr. Pattnaik’s organization generated a database of 20,000 Oriya-Oriya
popular words, through the help of science writers who have long
experience in popularizing technology and science in the Oriya language.
They also produced an English-Oriya dictionary which currently has 6,000
words, and they hope it will reach 15,000 words soon. They will also add
explanations in Oriya of terms, and reverse the database to generate an
Oriya-English database as well. All this is available in [StarDict
format](http://stardict.sourceforge.net/), which means that it can be
easily used in applications for Mac, Linux, and Windows. As well, they
have contributed word lists to [aspell](http://aspell.net), to improve
spell-checking for Oriya on Linux.

**Assamese localization of GNOME\
**

This was presented by Gora, since the fellow A. Phukan could not be
present. Phukan works with RedHat, which has been doing a lot of
localization work, and lately working on an interface for submitting
translations through the web (similar to LaunchPad, but perhaps more
open source).

Assamese is closely related to Bengali and Oriya, and is spoken in
Assam. [C-DAC](http://cdac.in) has already done valuable work localizing
software, however they don’t work closely with the community, and thus
use too formal words that are unnatural to users, and when they are
done, just hand off the results and leaves - whereas software
localization is something that has to happen continually in a process.

In addition to localization work, Phukan has also created an [online
dictionary of Assamese](http://www.xobdo.org/), based on user
contributions.

**Marathi and Urdu User Guide to Open Office**

![](http://lh6.ggpht.com/shaklev/SJ_44GMK46I/AAAAAAAACPA/BZsxFHv9jRI/s288/100_0427.JPG)This
was also presented by Gora. [Sarvangin Vikas
Sansthan](http://svs.org.in/) use “reversed rewards” to get localization
done. They post a number of possible jobs they can do on their website,
together with an extremely reasonable price, and they wait for people to
fund them. In this project, they translated the 380+ page user guide to
OpenOffice into Marathi and Urdu. One thing I noticed from the
screenshots was that they were based on non-localized versions of OO.org
(ie. with English menus, etc).

The organization also does a lot of training in OpenOffice an other OSS
software in schools in Maharashtra.

I will write about day 2 in a separate post.

Stian