Khidki or window? ... or is it something else? Most of the common e-terms such as open, save, view, edit and rename are translated competently. One place where the translators have excelled in particular is 'Raddi mein bheje' (of course.
it's written in Devanagari script in the menus!) which is a delightful and comprehensible translation of 'Send to Trash'. It translates the concept of a trash can into that of a pile of raddi on the image level. Way to go! Immigrant concept, naturalised fully.

But a very few words. though not quite lost at the airport, are delayed by the customs. Consider 'page layout', and then ponder over the Hindi translation in the OpenOffice.org suite of Ubuntu 8.1O-prushtha vikhandan purvavalokan. I'm no Hindi expert, and presumably more people than Ashutosh Rana speak like that-no offence intended-but everyone doesn't. And I have never adhisthapit (install) any vancchit (default) applications. These,concepts had better be trans-created instead of translated. They look really awkward in the guest language.

These are rare, very rare (and comic) issues with the Hindi desktop. The translators are not entirely to blame. Wl1at can they do, when for example, there is no adequately co-Iocational term for 'window' in Hindi? The word 'khidki' cannot be suggested except in humour, until the word accumulates new meaning. Dear, dear me. A bold alternative could be to translate the concept of a 'window' using an Indian visual (as was done while translating the 'Trash Can' concept). 'jharokha' here could be a choice. It has co-Iocational pedigree as well as a really nice sound.

The desktop menus, right-click menus, dialogue boxes and mouse-over info have been translated, as well as the menus of the popular applications such as OpenOffice.org writer, spreadsheet. presentation, Evolution mail, dictionary, movie player, Pidgin instant messenger, Gedit, Terminal, and GNOME games. Mozilla Firefox is not touched. As for the Rhythmbox music player, it is only partially translated. Information and warning messages are also translated. And illes can be renamed in your language script also. Rather bafflingly, the help files have not been translated at all! At its current state, the desktop in our test distribution looks as if a native speaker would be at home with it. Oh, how he can vikhanditise his prushts ...