User:Pavanaja/FUEL GILT abstract

Abstract

Here is the abstract of my submission to the FUEL GILT Conference 2016:

Title:Localisation experiences in Kannada and Tulu Wikipedias

Kannada and Tulu belong to Dravidian family of languages. Geographically and politically they both belong to Karnataka. Both languages share a lot of things and there are many common words used in both languages. At the same time Kannada and Tulu have their own distinct identities. One striking feature is that Tulu has less Sanskrit words compared to Kannada. Tulu had its own script and grammar but over the years the usage of Tulu script has been discontinued. Nowadays most Tulu people use Kannada script. This has led to the usage of many Kannada words in place of original Tulu words.

Tulu Wikipedia was in incubation since 2008. Recently it became live. One of the main requirement to make it live was to have major strings translated into Tulu. Most of the commonly used strings have been translated now. Kannada has an established history of science and technology writings and well developed glossary is available. It was quite easy to localise the strings used in Mediawiki into Kannada, which very fall under FUEL category. But Tulu does not have this history. It was quite difficult to localise most of the strings. At many places Kannada strings have been used. Many more strings are yet to be localised.

All these experiences will be presented during the conference with examples.