Tuesday, August 04, 2009

FUEL @ CDAC GIST on 31st Jul and 1st Aug

What a nice two days on discussing FUEL (frequently used entries for localization) for Marathi, problem is "though Marathi is my mother tongue i don't use all the Marathi words regularly"
in fact i found that almost, may be more that 50% words of Marathi i never use in my day to day conversation.

It revised lots of my Marathi words.

It was event i attended ever on Marathi, i found Marathi language is so rich in words.

I think translating words from English to Marathi looks like very much one-to-many mapping like thing

example:

in English we use one word at many location and meaning keeps on changing but

in Marathi even for same thing we have different word according situation

smell can be good or bad

in Marathi it can be
good smell = सुवास/सुगंध
bad smell = वास / दुर्गंध

at so many location we found this diversity and then finally decided to do by actual context of word :)

the one thing "Clean Up by Name" is nothing but sort according name so we used corresponding word for Marathi

we didn't took a big risk of translating into word which 90% of Marathi people will not understand and may be they will need to see in dictionary what this Marathi word exactly mean.

so we preferred to do transliteration instead of translation since these English word are so widely used by people that keeping them as it is will help people lot.

example: setting
even people in 1st class also say sometime setting ;)

We had a really difficult time in translating some words like:
Buddy Pounces, scenarios, detective, control, autotext and anchor.

Though there is corresponding word available in dictionary, but it should satisfy context as well, that was the main problem.

But finally we completed whole FUEL list on second Day.

thanks to GIST ,CDAC and specially Mr. Mahesh Kulkarni for coordination and off course Sandip Shedmake for his patience in listening all attendees suggestion.

some snaps: