In an interesting article in India’s leading tech e-news paper, Venkatesh Hariharan, co-founder of Indlinux.org, talks about the speed at which Indian software is localizing,

“We are all set to launch our very first Gnome CD that supports most of the major Indian languages in the next couple of months. The MOSIC based bootable CD ROM has been christened ‘Rangoli’ – which literally means an array of different colours. Just a few months back, Gujarati and Punjabi were no where on the local language radar. With the acceptance of Linux desktops growing steadily, and its maturity now proven, interns were hired from Gujarat for translation – an initiative taken by a group called Utkarsh. To give an example of the commitment of project volunteers, a translator actually sat for 19 hours at a stretch to convert 2000 strings of Linux into Punjabi!””

Punjabi, Marathi, Bengali, Malayalam, Hindi and Gujarati, among others, are supported in this freeware version of Gnome.