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Monday, 9 May 2011

Blogger Posts in Hindi

It just occurred to me today. I wondered if we should write Blogger posts in Hindi. Hindi is the primary language of India. English is the second language. Hindi is the fourth ranked language in numbers of people who speak it as a native language. The estimated total number of Hindi speakers is 405 million.

I have just written a page on cat breed info in Hindi! It is a Google translation of course. Hindi is written left to right so that helps.

The point is this. India is a rapidly developing country and there are a good number of billionaires in India. They manufacture cars for export to Europe in India for example. The people are becoming westernized. In the west the domestic cat is a very popular family member. There are about 80 million domestic cats in America.

Is it not possible that Hindi speaking Indians might want to read Blogger posts about cats in Hindi? Why impose the English language on people whose first language is Hindi? To publish in Hindi might encourage visits from a sector of the world internet community that is currently excluded.

What is interesting is that my hosting company cannot deal with Hindi script. It just converts it into nonsense numbers! My HTML editor (Kompozer) does the same - complete meltdown. All the SEO stuff goes out the window as the file name has to be in English or Western style script.

But Google Blogspot Blogger sites like this one, which is a subdomain of PoC can cope beautifully with the Hindi script.

Google themselves are, I think, sympathetic to producing services in non-English languages including Arabic type scripts.

It seems to me that we should not automatically assume that all Hindi speaking people in India speak English well enough to understand a website in English or if they do we should respect their first language, Standard Hindi.

The big question mark is how good is the Google translation using Google Translate? I will need someone to make a comment on the post I have just made.

Michael Avatar

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