Re: [tor-dev] Urdu & Hindi translations of Tor browser ?

[Sukhbir Singh <azadi@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> I was really surprised; Hindi is the third-most spoken language in the
> world, trailing only Mandarin and English. Of the top 10 languages in
> this Wikipedia list, Tor Browser is missing localizations only for
> Hindi, Bengali, and Malay. (Urdu is #11.)
> 
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers

There is a simple reason for this and while this may be anecdotal, this
may shed some light on why there are no Hindi or Urdu translations of
open source software: almost all users I know whose native language is
Hindi, Bengali (or other Indic languages), use their OS and other
software in English.  (English is the official language of India and
Pakistan, along with Hindi and Urdu respectively.) I am sure other users
from India/Pakistan can back this up, but personally, even though my
native language is Punjabi and Hindi, I have always selected "English"
when installing Debian. Similary, I have almost never seen a copy of
Windows in any of the local languages, anywhere in India.

The English precedence is slowly changing though, with more and more
technology products being shipped in local languages so that they can
reach populations that don't speak English (which is more in number than
the population that can.)

So while my experience with this has been different from Griffin's in
that no Tor user in India has asked me for a translation in their local
language, I think the simple reason may be that English-speaking
population doesn't feel the need and right now, they are the ones that
dominate the online market. Not that this is an excuse for not having
local translations, but I am stating the probable reasons for the lack
of translations.

-- 
Sukhbir
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