One should ask the govt machinery what have they been doing with the crores of public money allocated to the tdil project since a number of years. They have been proclaiming that they have been working on it for a long time. The first time I came across the tdil.mit.gov.in site was in 1999 or 2000 and now they want volunteers to do the work they have already been paid for.

What is needed is Sam Pitroda type free hand and enlightened accountable management that brought cdac/cdot etc into being. Not this type of govt bureaucracy which is all too prevalent now at cdac, csir, icar and other public sector units including drdo.

When the new Maran became minister of IT after his father's death, this ministry had promised that they would soon be bringing out linux software customised in Tamil first (which they did finally) and then in other languages. the Tamil work was done but haven't heard what happened with machine translation and other highly publicised projects.

The bottomline is that bureaucrats (and seniority based chaps) should not be in control of huge projects without any accountability mechanism.

Kush

Frederick Noronha (FN) wrote:

                  Empanelment of translators 
                               &
               janabhaaratii Translation Workshop

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http://www.janabhaaratii.org.in/janabhaaratii/page_gen.php?lang=en&body=...

janabhaaratii project at C-DAC, Mumbai funded by Technology Development in Indian Language (TDIL) Group of Ministry of Communication &IT, Govt. of India is a community oriented Indian language initiative.

We plan to bring computing power to non-English speaking people by translating the desktop menus, help messages, files, FAQ's, error messages etc of GNU Linux System in various Indian languages. To begin with – translations in the Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, Malayalam languages are planned. Through janabhaaratii project, we have already made available live CD's for these languages that one can use to input, edit, and display & print Indian language text easily.

We would like to invite prospective translators who can contribute to this work on a payment basis. We will hold workshops to acquaint them with the following on 2nd Friday of every month:

  * Familiarity with Indian Language text processing using GNU/Linux
    platform.
  * Different kinds of translations & issues thereof.
  * Tools to support translations.

We would also like to empanel translators for doing this task. In case you are interested Please fill the form & submit.

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