Hindi Hub Articles
Why Translating Your Website in Hindi Makes Better Sense
Did you know that in 2002, an estimated 32% of Internet users were non-English speakers? With the phenomenal growth of computer usage and the spread of the net fever, especially in the third world countries, the figure would have multiplied manifold in the past 4 years.
In fact, the Internet is fast becoming the basic and fundamental source and dissemination of information, purchases of goods and services worldwide. In addition, those computer and Internet users are increasingly from non-English speaking countries. This figure is constantly rising. In response, businesses have quickly become aware of the benefits of making their websites relevant to the native languages of the target audience.
Marketing is all about speaking the customers’ language
There is no denying that the rest of the world outside of English-speaking countries is coming online faster than never before. What is the state of affairs, and how does that impact businesses worldwide? How serious is the impact of everyone “going global”? And, more importantly, what needs to be done with our Websites to fully take advantage of this wave of non-English-speaking people coming online?
Whether or not a person speaks English has really nothing to do with the responsibility of a Website to communicate in the language of the target markets. Indians read English just fine, and yet they feel comfortable to surf in their own language. They live their life in their own language, not in English. If you want to attract their attention, your site has to go where they are, and speak to them in their own language.
Outside the seven countries where English is native, and India too, there is no form of marketing in any country that happens in English. If someone doesn’t believe this, they should visit Europe, Asia or South America. People live their life in their own language, and your marketing better follow, whether the media is newspaper/magazine ads/articles, radio/TV, billboards… or Websites.
Enter Website Translation
Translating a Website is a viable answer because you then make an existing website accessible, usable and culturally suitable to your specific target audience. This requires both programming expertise and linguistic/cultural knowledge.
In the majority of cases it is the lack of linguistic and cultural input that lets a website localization project down. In order to give an insight into the impact culture has on website localization the following examples depict areas in which a solid understanding of the target culture is necessary.
Some very good reasons to translate your website into Hindi
• One of the official languages of India, with a population of over 1 billion. Hindi has 366 million first-language speakers; additional 121 million second-language speakers. Spoken throughout northern India: Delhi; Uttar Pradesh; Rajasthan; Punjab; Madhya Pradesh; northern Bihar; Himachal Pradesh.
• Hindi is also spoken in Bangladesh, Belize, Botswana, Germany, Kenya, Nepal, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, Uganda, UAE, United Kingdom, USA, Yemen, and Zambia.
• With the growing numbers of Indans buying PC’s and Internet access available from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, English speakers will soon be in the minority when it comes to Internet use.
• Results of research carried out by Nielsen-Net ratings in March 2005 described foreign internet markets as “low hanging fruit,” i.e. if you have the will and foresight there are massive revenues to be found for relatively little effort.
• As Kaizad Gotla, senior analyst at Nielsen-Netratings states, “The easiest opportunities are in countries where Internet usage patterns and user/site relationships are less established. Acquiring users in markets that are currently in their growth stages will lead to a loyal user base that will pay dividends for Internet companies in the future.”
• The ability to communicate to a whole new audience in their own language will undoubtedly yield results not only in a financial sense (cost efficiency) but also in terms of marketing and creating awareness of your brand, service or product.
• For non-English speaking users looking for your product or service, you automatically capture their attention.
• A Hindi website shows you are thinking about the customer. That little extra effort shows you have thought and cared enough about them to offer the website in their language.
• For many cultures, more so in India, there is an issue of trust when it comes to buying over the Internet, especially if they feel it is in a language they are not fully proficient in. Offering them a language alternative allows the customers to feel secure
• Search engines lead people to your site. In countries such as China, Japan and France, Google, Yahoo and MSN are not the default search engines. Homegrown search engines are emerging and they are proving successful because they work in native languages and are focused on the habits and needs of their users. In addition, many of the key search engines, especially Google, are developing the capacity to run searches in Hindi. Having pages of your site available in Hindi ensures maximum potential for your site being picked up in searches.
Making a website in Hindi or translating the existing website does not complete the task. There are a lot of important, cultural, ethnic issues which form an essential part of the contents of the website in Hindi. Some examples, which need to be decided upon, in greater details, are mentioned below:
• Images and pictures – as they carry subtle cultural intonations in them.
• Symbols – as with pictures, symbols can cause problems. Icons using fingers such as an OK sign or V-sign may mean different things to different cultures. Western symbols do not always mean the same abroad.
• Colors – they are also loaded with cultural meanings.
• Ease of navigation – Access to certain pages is also a factor that can be considered as relevant.
Culture affects everything we do, say, read, hear and think and even websites cannot escape the influence of culture.
The impact of culture on the translation of a website is huge. The above few examples are literally the tip of the iceberg.
Why Translating Your Website in Hindi Makes Better Sense
Did you know that in 2002, an estimated 32% of Internet users were non-English speakers? With the phenomenal growth of computer usage and the spread of the net fever, especially in the third world countries, the figure would have multiplied manifold in the past 4 years.
In fact, the Internet is fast becoming the basic and fundamental source and dissemination of information, purchases of goods and services worldwide. In addition, those computer and Internet users are increasingly from non-English speaking countries. This figure is constantly rising. In response, businesses have quickly become aware of the benefits of making their websites relevant to the native languages of the target audience.
Marketing is all about speaking the customers’ language
There is no denying that the rest of the world outside of English-speaking countries is coming online faster than never before. What is the state of affairs, and how does that impact businesses worldwide? How serious is the impact of everyone “going global”? And, more importantly, what needs to be done with our Websites to fully take advantage of this wave of non-English-speaking people coming online?
Whether or not a person speaks English has really nothing to do with the responsibility of a Website to communicate in the language of the target markets. Indians read English just fine, and yet they feel comfortable to surf in their own language. They live their life in their own language, not in English. If you want to attract their attention, your site has to go where they are, and speak to them in their own language.
Outside the seven countries where English is native, and India too, there is no form of marketing in any country that happens in English. If someone doesn’t believe this, they should visit Europe, Asia or South America. People live their life in their own language, and your marketing better follow, whether the media is newspaper/magazine ads/articles, radio/TV, billboards… or Websites.
Enter Website Translation
Translating a Website is a viable answer because you then make an existing website accessible, usable and culturally suitable to your specific target audience. This requires both programming expertise and linguistic/cultural knowledge.
In the majority of cases it is the lack of linguistic and cultural input that lets a website localization project down. In order to give an insight into the impact culture has on website localization the following examples depict areas in which a solid understanding of the target culture is necessary.
Some very good reasons to translate your website into Hindi
• One of the official languages of India, with a population of over 1 billion. Hindi has 366 million first-language speakers; additional 121 million second-language speakers. Spoken throughout northern India: Delhi; Uttar Pradesh; Rajasthan; Punjab; Madhya Pradesh; northern Bihar; Himachal Pradesh.
• Hindi is also spoken in Bangladesh, Belize, Botswana, Germany, Kenya, Nepal, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, Uganda, UAE, United Kingdom, USA, Yemen, and Zambia.
• With the growing numbers of Indans buying PC’s and Internet access available from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, English speakers will soon be in the minority when it comes to Internet use.
• Results of research carried out by Nielsen-Net ratings in March 2005 described foreign internet markets as “low hanging fruit,” i.e. if you have the will and foresight there are massive revenues to be found for relatively little effort.
• As Kaizad Gotla, senior analyst at Nielsen-Netratings states, “The easiest opportunities are in countries where Internet usage patterns and user/site relationships are less established. Acquiring users in markets that are currently in their growth stages will lead to a loyal user base that will pay dividends for Internet companies in the future.”
• The ability to communicate to a whole new audience in their own language will undoubtedly yield results not only in a financial sense (cost efficiency) but also in terms of marketing and creating awareness of your brand, service or product.
• For non-English speaking users looking for your product or service, you automatically capture their attention.
• A Hindi website shows you are thinking about the customer. That little extra effort shows you have thought and cared enough about them to offer the website in their language.
• For many cultures, more so in India, there is an issue of trust when it comes to buying over the Internet, especially if they feel it is in a language they are not fully proficient in. Offering them a language alternative allows the customers to feel secure
• Search engines lead people to your site. In countries such as China, Japan and France, Google, Yahoo and MSN are not the default search engines. Homegrown search engines are emerging and they are proving successful because they work in native languages and are focused on the habits and needs of their users. In addition, many of the key search engines, especially Google, are developing the capacity to run searches in Hindi. Having pages of your site available in Hindi ensures maximum potential for your site being picked up in searches.
Making a website in Hindi or translating the existing website does not complete the task. There are a lot of important, cultural, ethnic issues which form an essential part of the contents of the website in Hindi. Some examples, which need to be decided upon, in greater details, are mentioned below:
• Images and pictures – as they carry subtle cultural intonations in them.
• Symbols – as with pictures, symbols can cause problems. Icons using fingers such as an OK sign or V-sign may mean different things to different cultures. Western symbols do not always mean the same abroad.
• Colors – they are also loaded with cultural meanings.
• Ease of navigation – Access to certain pages is also a factor that can be considered as relevant.
Culture affects everything we do, say, read, hear and think and even websites cannot escape the influence of culture.
The impact of culture on the translation of a website is huge. The above few examples are literally the tip of the iceberg.
Hot Hindi Stuff Online:
Dreaming in Hindi: Coming Awake in Another LanguageAt a time when her life seemed to be crumbling, Katherine Russell Rich took on a writing assignment in India, where she was seduced by the idea of learning to speak Hindi, the language she heard swirling all around her. In a rash moment, she determined she’d go live and study in the ancient city of Udaipur. That decision lead to unexpected reclamation. In this beautiful and spirited memoir, she documents her experiences, from the bizarre to the frightening to the full-out exhilarating. Seamlessly combining her courageous (and often hilarious) personal journey with reporting on the science of language acquisition, Dreaming in Hindi offers an eye-opening account of what learning a new tongue can teach us about distant worlds and, ultimately, about ourselves. 
Dreaming in Hindi: Coming Awake in Another LanguageAn eye-opening and courageous memoir that explores what learning a new language can teach us about distant worlds and, ultimately, ourselves.
After miraculously surviving a serious illness, Katherine Rich found herself at an impasse in her career as a magazine editor. She spontaneously accepted a freelance writing assignment to go to India, where she found herself thunderstruck by the place and the language, and before she knew it she was on her way to Udaipur, a city in the northwestern state of Rajasthan, in order to learn Hindi. Rich documents her experiences—ranging from the bizarre to the frightening to the unexpectedly exhilarating—using Hindi as the lens through which she is given a new perspective not only on India, but on the radical way the country and the language itself were changing her. Fascinated by the process, she went on to interview linguistics experts around the world, reporting back from the frontlines of the science wars on what happens in the brain when we learn a new language. She brings both of these experiences together seamlessly in Dreaming in Hindi, a remarkably unique and thoughtful account of self-discovery.
Sketches from My Past: Encounters with India's Oppressed (Hindi Edition)This is a translation of Mahadevi Varma's 'Ateet Ke Chalchitra' by Neera Kuckreja Sohoni. Includes case studies with poor Indians, mostly women.
Mahadevi Varma: Political Essays on Women, Culture, and NationThis edited volume of translations covers the major political essays of India's first feminist Hindi poet. A devout follower and advocate of Gandhi, Mahadevi Varma is a household name in India and is a major woman of letters in the modern Hindi world. The essays collected in this volume represent some of Mahadevi Varma’s most famous writings on the “woman question” in India. The collection also includes an introduction to her life, with biographical notes, an analysis of her importance in the field of Hindi letters, as well as a selection of her poems – these latter because Mahadevi Varma made her mark in the world of Hindi literature through her poetry, and a volume of translations would be incomplete without a sampling of them. The introduction to the translated volume sketches Mahadevi Varma's life and work and her significance to both the development of modern standard Hindi as well as to the nascent women's movement underway in the 1920s in India. Little scholarly attention has been given in the academy outside of India to Varma’s numerous contributions to women’s education, to the development of modern standard Hindi, and to political thought during the Independence movement in late-colonial India. This volume of translations engages themes like language and nationalism, women’s roles as artists, the politics of motherhood and marriage—themes that continue to be relevant to women’s lives in contemporary India and to movements for women’s rights outside India as well. This volume of translations of Mahadevi Varma’s feminist political essays is the first of its kind. While some of these essays, especially those from Mahadevi Varma’s Hamari Shrinkhala Ki Kariyan collection have been translated by Neera K. Sohoni and published under the title Links in the Chain (Katha, 2003), there is no sustained treatment of Varma’s political thinking in one, accessible volume. While there is ample work on Varma in Hindi, scholars of feminism (and students of Hindi who are in the nascent stages of language acquisition) have nowhere to turn for a comprehensive sampling of her work. Mahadevi Varma is also one of the most difficult writers to access even for trained scholars of Hindi language and literature. Her highly Sanskritized diction and her stylized prose sketches make her work a pleasure to read in the original but daunting to translate into English. This volume has contributions from some of the most highly regarded Hindi experts. In the editor’s introduction to the volume of translations a brief biographical sketch followed by an analysis of the political climate of Northern India has been provided so that the reader unfamiliar with India of the 1920s-1940s will have the necessary historical context to place her work. The introduction to the volume also raises the issue of why she gave up writing poetry and turned solely to writing prose when she became involved with the movements for women’s rights and national independence. Finally, the volume provides feminist cultural historians a rich archive of how Indian women like Mahadevi Varma were actively negotiating their lives as women, activists, artists, teachers, and married women. This work will be of use to scholars of Hindi language and literature in the US/European academy and should be of interest to cultural and feminist historians of modern India. This volume will introduce Mahadevi Varma’s literary scope to an English-speaking audience, and will serve as a reference for feminist historians of the nationalist period in the Indian subcontinent.
Poetry, Politics and Culture: Essays on Indian Texts and ContextsThis book maps the journey of the Indian poetic imagination—in Hindi, Panjabi and Indian English—from its original quasi-spiritual longings to its activist interventions in the public domain. As Indian poetry of the post-1990s gravitates towards a non-Orientalised postcolonial nationalism, it seeks to rewrite and disseminate the shifting coordinates of nationalist imagination in terms of the dissent of the subaltern discontents of the nation.
The book is interdisciplinary: it studies Indian poetry from the new emerging imperatives of postcolonialism, new historiography (subaltern, dalit and diasporas), nationalism, and cultural studies. Covering the two major north Indian languages—Hindi and Punjabi—along with poetry in Indian English, the book is a close textual study of about 150 poetry collections in these languages. It is path-breaking in its study of secular poetry written in the so-called vernaculars, with critical attention to its participation in the political as well as cultural processes of nation-making.
This cutting-edge book should be of interest to scholars of Indian writings in English, Hindi and Panjabi, gender studies, dalit and diaspora studies, postcolonial poetry and to students reading South Asian literature and culture.
Language Versus Dialect: Linguistic and Literary Essays on Hindi, Tamil and SarnamiIndia has a multiplicity of languages and dialects. Papers in this volume present a variegated overview of the problem relative to two great literary languages,Hindi(including Sarnami) and Tamil. From a methodological point of view they represent a description of different linguistic and literacy aspects and problems.
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