TAMIL

1 view

Skip to first unread message

scss...@gmail.com

unread,

Aug 22, 2007, 6:37:42 AM8/22/07

to Google India Labs

Hi Google India guys,

It's nice to see a separate lab for India from Google. And the first
few products are good to see. Congrats.

I would like to draw your attention to some of the needs and
questions
of tamil google products user community.

1. There are more than 2000+ Tamil bloggers using the Blogger.com
service. It would be nice if you would offer a chance to translate it
in tamil by the community.

Right now it is not available for translation from http://www.google.com/transconsole/tc.py
. also, some of the services like gmail are repeatedly nearing
completion in translation but we never get to see a tamil gmail
interface. any clear clues, guidelines that will help the volunteer
translation community would help us help gmail in doing that. also,
this volunteer translation setup is a mess and doesn't facilitate
colloboration between the volunteers. some system like launchpad or
giving the language files as .po files would help.

2. Like the embedded hindi transliteration available for blogger,
Please provide the facility for Tamil too. I am sure that this may be
in the table for all indian languages too.

But some notes to take care when you implement this. There are three
popular keyboard layouts for tamil in practise. they are the roman or
QWERTY transliteration keyboard, Tamilnet99 phonetic keyboard,
Typewriter style Bamini Keyboard. Giving just the transliteration
keyboard will not help 2/3rds of tamil users. So, please give all 3
options.

3. There are already lot of online / offline transliteration tools
for
tamil. So yet another tool from google may not be of much use unless
it allows user customisation of keys and inbuilt spell checker.

4. I have shared some ideas for a grammar based tamil spell checker
at
http://blog.ravidreams.net/?p=164 . A tamil in google team could help
google india team comprehend this approach. The current auto spell
checker for tamil in gmail and google docs is a welcome addition. But
if you could tell us how it works, may be we could help google make
it
better. There are a lot of tamil computing enthusiasts online. One
much needed feature in this spell checker is that it should allow
ignoring mistakes and adding words to it.

5. Google news Tamil version would be great to see. There are lot of
tamil unicode news sites like yahoo tamil, msn tamil, thatstamil,
tamil.webdunia etc.,