"Yeh beech waala button teen baar dabaana hai, fir yeh waale button se is cheez ko doosre number pe laana hai, fir yeh waala button tab tak dabaate raho jab tak jo channel set karna hai wo na aa jaye, fir is beech waale button ko dabaate raho jab tak menu chala na jaaye"**
WheW!! That was me teaching my maid servant how to tune channels in her TV set.
More than 85% of India's population lives in the rural areas. Of the remaining which live in the cities, a large chunk cannot read/write in English. Thus, it can be safely assumed that a HUGE consumer base (~90%) in India is not familiar with the language of the queen.
Why then, do all the consumer electronic goods have instruction manuals, remotes, online menus, etc. in English?
I realized this fact when my maid servant asked me to teach her how to tune channels in her TV set and the entire procedure mentioned above had to be repeated for Channels #1, #2 and #3 till she mastered it!
I checked out the language options on the TV and the menus were available in either English or Vietnamese! WTF? IIRC the TV was some weird brand ("Igo" or something) - but come on, Vietnamese? In place of Hindi? For a product in India?
The other tough part was the remote control. None of the button were marked in Hindi. So she has to remember them by their shape or position - "Beech waala, gol waala, side waala, oopar waala, neecha waala..." - you get the point.
With almost all the companies targeting rural markets, a serious thought should be given to remote controls with markings in both, Hindi and English, and online menus in Hindi by default (so that one doesn't have to call in the service engineer to change the language).
It was sad to explain a very literate and educated woman how to operate the TV in such a way.
PS: Just before posting this entry, I checked out my Sony Trinitron. It has a remote control with only English markings and language options for the menus are - English and Arabic!
**Translated to English - "Press this button in the center thrice, then press this button to get this thing to the second position, then keep pressing this button till you get the required channel, finally press the button in the center again to make the menu disappear" :-D
When I was doing my training in Samtel, one of the research labs bought a Plasma Display Panel (PDP) from Japan. The entire instruction menu was in Japanese, including the instruction that tells you how to convert the display to English.
ReplyDeleteWe were lucky to get through, with hit and trial ofcourse.
How about adding new and vibrant links to other people's blogs?
ReplyDeleteTry pradyot.blogspot.com
C'mon dude, get some new links on this page.
Indianize! ;)
@Ankush: Same in South Korea. I wanted to buy some electronics stuff from there but everything was in Korean, right from the menu, markings on the buttons to the accompanying manual! I guess India will never be able to get rid of its love for all things western!
ReplyDelete@Ashutosh: With the multitude of patents in this field I will be spending more on patent licensing fee than I'll earn. I checked out my Sony VCD player at home and the back reads - "Product protected under U.S. Patents No. XXXXX, YYYYY and ZZZZZ!"
85% in rural india ?
ReplyDeletesomething seems wrong in that stats...neways my tv has hindi also almost all the nokia phones (atleast) have hindi (with hindi sms capabilities too),even atm machines are in hindi...dude once go to some rural AP,TN,Karnataka,kerala,mah,guj etc village and you will understand why the menus are not in indian languages...there are so many languages that it's not quiet possible to adapt all the things in the local languages ...though I must say it has some disadvantages too(as I am experiencing here ..when the customare care of your cell phone starts speaking in telgu !!!) Also IGO is some chinese something brand and they don't care about their products after selling them
--piyush
very true, not having hindi menu in electronics equipments can still be understood, coz most of these are manufactured by MNC's. But what do you say about HINDI movies, their entire casting is in english, even the Movie Name which mostly is a hindi word(s) is also written in english. We are just biased towards english... the same bias has been beautifully captured by Navbharat Times's latest media campaign.
ReplyDeletebtw.. nice to see a fellow kanpuria in blog world. I am too a pakka kanpuria though i presently live in Delhi.
I agree with you Saurabh. But until we Indians value ourselves, our languages how could we expect these foreign manufacturers to invest into Indianizing the stuff?
ReplyDeleteI've seen you being active on ILUG-D also. Why don't you start contributing to translate softwares (obviously FLOSS) in Indian languages? Google needs contribution, Debian is putting up efforts for the same in many Indian languages and we need volunteers.
Each of us need to start at home:
Nij bhasha unnati ahe sab unnati ko mool
cheers :-)
सही कहा आपने।
ReplyDelete