5 ms·

It's a long-running joke that Youtube is a Hindi Stack Overflow, albeit non-text based, though you can view transcripts.

captn3m0 6y ago
Yup, writing good technical content in Hindi is nigh-impossible.
- xxpor 6y ago
  I've noticed that Twitter will translate Hindi written in Roman characters, which is certainly common on the internet, but I'd think given (AFAIK) there's no formal standard for it it'd be hard to get good data to feed into an AI. Or is it enough of a 1-1 transliteration that all you need to do is encode the Roman->Devanagari rules and that'll work nearly 100% of the time?
  - abdullahkhalids 6y ago
    There are several standards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari_transliteration#Transliteration_comparison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari_transliteration#Tra... Nobody bothers to use them. Same for Urdu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Urdu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Urdu
  - OJFord 6y ago
    The standard is IAST - but colloquially people don't use it, preferring a more Anglophone phonetic approximation (since English literacy is high) so you get 'aloo' instead of 'alū' (potato) and 'jeera' instead of 'jīra' (cumin), for example. It's quite annoying as a learner, since it can make it difficult to map back to devnagārī (resp. devnagari) to look up a new word, for example. (It's almost entirely true to say that devnagārī script is phonetic, so if you write कुछ and I don't know the word, I know how to pronounce it without knowing what it means, and can ask someone or look it up, which is a great feature that English of course doesn't have at all, and while Hindi phonetic approximation in the alphabet might get closer, it's still non-standard and different typers will spell words differently.)
  - captn3m0 6y ago
    The challenge isn’t with the script - it’s with lack of acceptable technical vocabulary in Hindi/English. Video works because Hinglish is how tech-talk in (many, not all) companies works. But you’d never see a technical doc in any of the these companies in Hindi, because you can’t even translate simple terms like Server or package-management. Even if you find acceptable translations, they aren’t immediately obvious, because nobody has heard them before. In a Python video, you might hear: “मेरा code requests library से Google server को HTTP request भेजता हैं” (My code uses the requests library to send HTTP requests to Google”. It works on video, but it doesn’t on text because nobody is used to reading this in Hindi in the first place.
    - arp242 6y ago
      So if I understand correctly, Latin characters aren't used for loanwords like this in written text? When I was young I used to play some MSX games in Japanese, the language doesn't really matter for a lot of these 1980s games, and you would frequently see English words and terms written in Latin characters used all over the place. Why won't this work for Hindi? Are people not familiar with these characters? Or is there just no tradition of doing so?
      - OJFord 6y ago
        That does happen, a common word for 'school' is स्कूल ('skūl') for example. It's just that another phenomenon is the alphabeticising of Hindi (as in actually Hindi words) like 'namaste aap kaise hain? Mera naam Ollie hoon' (IAST āp, nām, olī, and hūñ) is a contrived sentence but the sort of thing someone might text if they didn't have the keyboard for नमस्ते आप कैसे हैं? मेरा नाम ओली हूँ or whatever reason.
      - captn3m0 6y ago
        > So if I understand correctly, Latin characters aren't used for loanwords like this in written text? It happens in casual text - WhatsApp forwards, SMS messages. But for official writing - you pick a language and stick to it, as much as possible. This made more than a few notices impossibly hard to read when I was in college, because the Hindi felt archaic, even if it wasn't. Other countries had a rich culture of research and scientific literature published in native languages. India never got that to a national scale, because India has hundreds of languages[0] so any efforts were local. A paper published in Tamil would be unreadable by folks a hundred miles away, so English became the technical lingua-franca of the nation (The colonial imposition didn't help either). When a developer searches stack-overflow for an answer, english works better because it serves all developers in India. [0]: India scores 0.914 on the Linguistic diversity Index, which ranges from 0 (everyone has the same mother tongue) to 1 (no two people have the same mother tongue)

captn3m0 6y ago

Yup, writing good technical content in Hindi is nigh-impossible.

xxpor 6y ago
I've noticed that Twitter will translate Hindi written in Roman characters, which is certainly common on the internet, but I'd think given (AFAIK) there's no formal standard for it it'd be hard to get good data to feed into an AI. Or is it enough of a 1-1 transliteration that all you need to do is encode the Roman->Devanagari rules and that'll work nearly 100% of the time?
- abdullahkhalids 6y ago
  There are several standards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari_transliteration#Transliteration_comparison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari_transliteration#Tra... Nobody bothers to use them. Same for Urdu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Urdu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Urdu
- OJFord 6y ago
  The standard is IAST - but colloquially people don't use it, preferring a more Anglophone phonetic approximation (since English literacy is high) so you get 'aloo' instead of 'alū' (potato) and 'jeera' instead of 'jīra' (cumin), for example. It's quite annoying as a learner, since it can make it difficult to map back to devnagārī (resp. devnagari) to look up a new word, for example. (It's almost entirely true to say that devnagārī script is phonetic, so if you write कुछ and I don't know the word, I know how to pronounce it without knowing what it means, and can ask someone or look it up, which is a great feature that English of course doesn't have at all, and while Hindi phonetic approximation in the alphabet might get closer, it's still non-standard and different typers will spell words differently.)
- captn3m0 6y ago
  The challenge isn’t with the script - it’s with lack of acceptable technical vocabulary in Hindi/English. Video works because Hinglish is how tech-talk in (many, not all) companies works. But you’d never see a technical doc in any of the these companies in Hindi, because you can’t even translate simple terms like Server or package-management. Even if you find acceptable translations, they aren’t immediately obvious, because nobody has heard them before. In a Python video, you might hear: “मेरा code requests library से Google server को HTTP request भेजता हैं” (My code uses the requests library to send HTTP requests to Google”. It works on video, but it doesn’t on text because nobody is used to reading this in Hindi in the first place.
  - arp242 6y ago
    So if I understand correctly, Latin characters aren't used for loanwords like this in written text? When I was young I used to play some MSX games in Japanese, the language doesn't really matter for a lot of these 1980s games, and you would frequently see English words and terms written in Latin characters used all over the place. Why won't this work for Hindi? Are people not familiar with these characters? Or is there just no tradition of doing so?
    - OJFord 6y ago
      That does happen, a common word for 'school' is स्कूल ('skūl') for example. It's just that another phenomenon is the alphabeticising of Hindi (as in actually Hindi words) like 'namaste aap kaise hain? Mera naam Ollie hoon' (IAST āp, nām, olī, and hūñ) is a contrived sentence but the sort of thing someone might text if they didn't have the keyboard for नमस्ते आप कैसे हैं? मेरा नाम ओली हूँ or whatever reason.
    - captn3m0 6y ago
      > So if I understand correctly, Latin characters aren't used for loanwords like this in written text? It happens in casual text - WhatsApp forwards, SMS messages. But for official writing - you pick a language and stick to it, as much as possible. This made more than a few notices impossibly hard to read when I was in college, because the Hindi felt archaic, even if it wasn't. Other countries had a rich culture of research and scientific literature published in native languages. India never got that to a national scale, because India has hundreds of languages[0] so any efforts were local. A paper published in Tamil would be unreadable by folks a hundred miles away, so English became the technical lingua-franca of the nation (The colonial imposition didn't help either). When a developer searches stack-overflow for an answer, english works better because it serves all developers in India. [0]: India scores 0.914 on the Linguistic diversity Index, which ranges from 0 (everyone has the same mother tongue) to 1 (no two people have the same mother tongue)