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South-Asian Language Interfaces for Greenstone

Collaborators and Coordinators: Sarada Ranganathan Endowment for Library Science (SRELS), IIM Kozhikode and Dr. K.T. Anuradha (NCSI, Bangalore)

The South Asian Greenstone Support effort is giving a high priority to encouraging the improvement, dissemination, testing and use of interfaces for South Asian languages in Greenstone. This project has been led by Dr. K.T. Anuradha (NCSI, Bangalore) and by the Sarada Ranganathan Endowment for Library Science (SRELS), also in Bangalore, with the support of a large number of Greenstone users in the region who have volunteered as translators.

Basic user interfaces for Greenstone now exist for 10 South Asian languages (Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Singhalese, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu). Of these languages, full user interfaces exist for Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi and Tamil, and the collection developers' interface (GLI) exists in addition for Kannada, Marathi and Tamil.

The "macro" files for the latest versions of the South Asian language interfaces can be downloaded in the compressed file South_Asian_langage_interfaces.zip (see below for installation details).

How to activate South Asian languages in Greenstone ?
How to make your language the default interface language of GSDL ?
Greenstone Translators for South Asian Languages

Here are the language interfaces automatically included with the more recent versions of Greenstone:

    Version 2.73, 2.74, 2.75, 2.80 & 2.81: Basic user interfaces for Bengali, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Singhalese, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu; full user interface and GLI for Marathi.

    Version 2.82: Above plus updates for Malayalam and Marathi; new interface for Gujarati.

    Version 2.83: Above plus updates for Gujarati, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil, and Telugu, GLI for Tamil, and Telugu.

    Version 2.84: Above plus updates for Telugu and full user interfaces for Bengali, Dhivehi and Nepali.

    The full Urdu interface completed after release of version 2.85 is available in the above consolidated interface file and at http://greenstonesupport.iimk.ac.in/multilingual.htm#urdu ; it will be incorporated in version 2.86.

Please visit this site created by NCSI, for some sample collections for five different Indian Language Interfaces in their Digital Library.

Two pilot Tamil Greenstone collections, developed by Prof. A. Neelameghan and S.K. Lalitha of SRELS with support from EIFL.net [http://www.eifl.net], are now available for public access on the New Zealand Digital Library website:

    The collection on Tamil Literary Devices contains about 20 lists of devices used by authors in their intellectual works and discourses, categorised into 10 groups and presented as Word documents (most of these devices are also used in other languages than Tamil).

    The collection on Tamil Figures of Speech contains about 190 figures of speech used in classical Tamil literature, grouped into 16 browsing categories.

For futher information on translation, Click Here

Volunteers for language interface translation work should refer to language maintainers . Criticism and suggestions from users of the language interfaces are invited, and should be addressed to the contact given on the above page. In both cases, please copy your message to Dr. M. G. Sreekumar

How to activate South Asian languages in Greenstone ?

If you are building digital libraries in South Indian languages, we recommend that you use version 2.82 of Greenstone or later, since improvements have continually been made in the support for multilingualism. If you decide to use your existing version of Greenstone, the language interface updates will not damage your system; however, certain features for searching or display of South Asian characters may function poorly, depending on the version of Greenstone that you are using.

To correctly insert and activate new or updated language interfaces, you should understand the following technical details: