View Full Version : Need Help with Translation/bengali
Informer45
01-03-2004, 01:40 AM
Iam a web developer in bangladesh.Iam assinged to convert a english web site into a Bengali(translate).
Do i have any help from HTML.By the way Bengali is not
a european Language
ronniethedodger
01-03-2004, 03:22 AM
The only thing I can think of is this search
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=english+to+bengali+translations
paulhiles
01-03-2004, 07:29 AM
There aren't any tools as such in HTML; it's primary use is as a Markup Language. So it will attempt to display or 'markup' any document that you code using its set of tags. The only help it can offer regarding foreign languages is in the use of character sets which tell the browser what language / characters are to be handled.
So... the short answer is to use UTF-8 encoding.(Unicode)
an example would be this addition to the <head> of your document.
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
The W3C site has a useful list of countries and the charsets most typically used for Web pages in various languages
http://www.w3.org/International/O-charset-lang.html -unfortunately Bengali is not included in this list, but it does point out that most languages will be rendered correctly by using UTF-8.
The version of Unicode which covers Bengali is Unicode 2.0. This version supports the Arabic, Armenian, Bengali, Bopomofo, Cyrillic, Devanagari (the script employed by Hindi and Sanskrit). Within Unicode 2.0, Bengali belongs to the ISCII Indic Scripts group. Each language has its own hexadecimal code that specifies the character set... which in turn, should give correct rendering to the text in your document.
FYI, Bengali characters are numbered: {U+0980..U+09FF}
There is also the Bengali Opentype Font (http://franz.stat.wisc.edu/~deepayan/Bengali/WebPage/Font/fonts.html) project that is attempting to archive Bengali literature, and I think you may find that interesting. The author's site is here: http://www.bengalinux.org/
For the actual translation, if there are no persons who speak both Bengali and English, your best bet is to use a professional translation agency. They will be expensive, but the result will be far superior to any web-based translation service.
Hope that helps
Paul
Informer45
01-04-2004, 06:15 AM
hey guys,
I'm new here,i did'nt expect the reply so soon thanks a lot.after I try it out ,will u inform u guys.Until next time,goodbye and have a nice day!
Informer45
01-10-2004, 04:57 AM
The problem is how do i write all that code
for bengali,if every letter is represented by a number
paulhiles
01-11-2004, 05:10 PM
The problem is how do i write all that code
for bengali,if every letter is represented by a number
Obviously writing every letter by its corresponding character code is not really a viable option. I did some more digging in a quest to find a possible solution. The results don't seem to offer a great deal of promise in the short term, anyway. The topic has come under discussion a few times in online mailing lists. The following messages are taken from a thread discussing "Bengali on the web" from the W3C mailing list.
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-ig/2001JulSep/0574.html
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-ig/2001JulSep/0597.html
I've included a particularly relevant section taken from Andrew Cunningham's post.
Andrew Cunningham is the Multilingual Technical Project Officer at the Accessibility and Evaluation Unit, Vicnet State Library of Victoria, Australia.
"An application needs to be able to support uniscribe (usp10.dll) which
handles all the complex script rendering. You also need Open Type fonts
designed for Bengali.
MS will not have Bengali support included in Windows till at least the
first post windows XP operating system release. The first step would be for
the microsoft to include Bengali support in uniscribe, then make this new
version of uniscribe available to font developers to create fonts, after
the locale/collation/input issues are resolved, it will be all bundled for
release in the next operating system."
"...the only way of handling bengali on the windows platform is to use custom
8-bit fonts. It would then be possible to create dynamic fonts (.pfr) and
embeded open type fonts. It would also be able to use these fonts to create
PDF files.
Obviously, unicode is the preferred long term solution, but Bengali, along
with Lao, Khmer, Myanmar, and a few other languages will probably not be
generally available in Windows (as a unicode solution) for a few more
years."