I am neither an expert nor a learned pundit of languages; however, it does not need the eye of post doctoral fellow to notice that websites and apps that try to Indianize their products by launching in various Indian languages fall short of standards–it seems they don’t do any type of QA or testing before launching these versions. Unlike English, these versions in various Indian languages suffer the neglect and therefore carry wrongly translated phrases.
If you take the case of Hindi, you will see a lot of disparity in learned users also–there are many versions of Hindi spellings that go around the web. You will see people writing लिये and लिए randomly. There are many Hindi content writers who does not understand the difference between vocative and oblique case of a sentence. But I think when it comes to launching a Hindi version of a website or an app, the company should take extra measures to ensure consistency.
Example of PayTM app
Almost 3 weeks ago, I sent this tweet to the CEO of PayTM and also their Twitter support. I didn’t expect any reply from their CEO but at least from their support team because they are usually very responsive. However, I was surprised when nobody replied and the error is still there.
@vijayshekhar @Paytm: there is a spelling mistake in Hindi. It should be बढ़ें not बढ़े pic.twitter.com/3o7oNLyoMT
— Vivek Kumar (@2indya) December 29, 2016
You see the spellings of बढ़े, which in its present form is the past form of बढ़ना. Suppose you are saying ‘they went forward’, you will say वो आगे बढ़े। But if you are looking to say ‘you go ahead’, you will write आप आगे बढ़ें। It is not that their translator or operator does not understand the difference because at the top, the correct usage of word चुनें is done.
It may look like a matter of small typo of spelling mistake but the frequent occurance of such mistakes is really irritating.
I wish companies do pay attention to such issues and make sure they have an error-free product in Indian languages too like they have in English.
