Added Hindi and Urdu

I added the Urdu translation of the blog software, and I also translated the blog commands into Hindi. Should I care to, I can now compose Hindi and Urdu versions of my posts. The translations of the blog software are crowdsourced.

I do not do much computing in Hindi, so I checked some of the phrases against the Wordpress translations in addition to querying to see how many instances there are of particular words on the Internet. For example, one phrase I was wavering on was the word for archive. अभिलेखागार abhilekhāgār or “archive” has 217,000 hits (many of which are Indian government archive websites), whereas अार्काइव ārkāiv has 592,000. That‘s what the Urdu translation went with as آرکائیو. So I went with अार्काइव. On the other hand, The Hindi word for “categories,” श्रेणियाँ shreṇiyāñ, had 814,000 pages, whereas कैटेगरी kaiṭegarī had 129,000 and the plural form कैटेगरियां only 49,100.

I am trying to figure out now what the best current CSS styling is for displaying Hindi and Urdu text on the Internet. Most browsers on recent computers can handle displaying the text to the extent that it is at least readable. Urdu in its preferred script, nastaʿlīq, is rather difficult to render, so I would be curious to hear suggestions. There are ways of embedding fonts in webpages that might be a possibility. I have not been following those technologies very closely, and so it will be interesting to find out how standardized the techniques are at this point.

ਟਿੱਪਣੀਆਂ