Dislaimers: The translations are produced using Google Translate and hence accuracy is not guaranteed. The hindi version was corrected by me.

Requirements for creating a multilingual page

I am making the assumption that the base language of the system is still English and we switch our editing language as required

Note : All of the below can be bypassed if you decide to write your HTML file using unicode escapes . But remember that this technique is error-prone and absolutely not-maintainable as a person reading your HTML source will only see a bunch of numbers (like வ ஶ (Tamil)) in the HTML source. Ofcourse the above is still displayed as (வ ஶ (Tamil) ) on the page. A complete list of the latest Unicode escapes can be found here.

• Font support in your system for your corresponding language. Currently most operating systems support most fonts.

  The above was generated on a Ubuntu 8.10 which has excellent support for different fonts. To check support for your own font, use System->Administration->Language Support

• Text Input Mechanism. There are atleast 2 ways i know of
  • Use a Unicode editor for inputting text in different languages.

    The above file was created in gvim 7.1. gvim has keymaps available for many languages. A keymap is a sequence of keystrokes on the keyboard which produces a letter in the desired language. Unicode editors like gvim may not be able to support all languages completely, like CJK languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) and thus one needs a more complex inputting method like SCIM (See next bullet).

  • Use a system called SCIM (Smart Common Input Method Platform) . This works only on Unixes as far as i know. SCIM allows one to input complex characters anywhere on a system. One can switch between various languages and also continue typing in the base language whenever desired.
• Typing Mechanisms for typing in a language using the english keyboard
  • Phonetic based - In this case the user types the language words using the standard keyboard. The system guesses the word using phonetics. I found this error prone but it works if you have to construct short sentences.
  • Inscript based (keyboard overlays) - This is the best method i guess for people who have to do serious editing. This basically overlays a virtual keyboard in the desired language on top of the existing keyboard. This can be natural way of editing once you get used to it. Keyboard layouts for Indian Languages (Hindi/Malayalam/Tamil/Oriya/Devanagari etc.) can be found here.

References

• http://eyegene.ophthy.med.umich.edu/unicode/
• http://tdil.mit.gov.in/keyoverlay.htm
• SCIM - http://scim-im.org

This file was created by Arun Viswanathan (aviswana@ieee.org) using gvim 7.1.314 on Ubuntu 8.10. Text in Hindi was entered using the SCIM system. Translations in remaining languages were carried out using Googles Translate Service (http://www.google.com/translate) and then cut pasted into gvim.