Hindi translations for limesurvey

I had an interesting experience today. We needed to translate a news article posted on limesurvey website into hindi. I had never done any translations before and had absolutely no idea how to do it. In the absence of a Hindi keyboard, it bacame all the more difficult.

My first thought was to try Google translations. After a couple attempts, I realized that the google translations wasn’t good enough. Fortunately, while googling for translations I stumbled upon 2 very useful resources – Google Transliterations and shabdkosh.

Using Google Transliterations, one can type hindi words using english alphabets and the transliteration engine automatically convrerts the words from english alphabets to hindi alphabets. On the other hand, shabdkosh is an excellent English to Hindi dictionary. On querying english words, it returns the translated words in hindi alphabets and makes life easier 🙂

It would have been a herculian task to do all the translations in the absence of these two amazing resources. I’ll be getting myself a HIndi keyboard in a couple days to make it easier to type in the hindi alphabets physically.

Google Summer of Code 2010: Limesurvey

The Google Summer of Code results are out and I luckily made it to the final list :D.

For those who aren’t aware of GSOC, The Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is an annual program, first held from May to August 2005, in which Google selects hundreds of students from across the world who successfully complete a requested free software/open-source coding project during the summer.

The event draws its name from the 1967 Summer of Love (of the Sixties counterculture), and the idea for the SoC came directly from Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. This year Google has awarded 1025 projects to about 125 organizations.

I’m working on the project “Limesurvey 1 – File Upload Question Type”

LimeSurvey (formerly PHPSurveyor) is an open source online survey application written in PHP based on a MySQL, PostgreSQL or MSSQL database. It enables users without coding knowledge to develop, publish and collect responses to surveys.

In all there are 3 GSoC students in Limesurvey. While I’m working on the File Upload Question Type project, the other two are working on the Database Storage Engine project.

My proposal is available here, feel free to take a look at it and drop back any feedback.