Hinglish-A Linguistic Blend of Hindi & English

Hinglish a widely spoken language nowadays in India and I feel it comes in use at most when you chat or message someone as it provides an easy way out, especially in Social media.However the name is based on the Hindi language, it does not refer exclusively to Hindi, however "is used in India, with English words blending with Hindi.

History

Since the time of British Raj, there has been a the past of Indic words making place in English. For Ex: Raj is a Hindi word for 'rule' and instead of “British Rule” the people used "British Raj" which is one of the earliest Hinglish words. Other words such as Guru, Yoga, Ghee, Pyjama comes under the same category.. Similarly, many English loan words also approached to stay in India such as Time, Late, School, College, District, State etc. are example of few words which have naturalized in Indic languages, long before the word Hinglish came into being.

In recent years, due to an increase in literacy and connectivity, the exchange and mixing of languages has reached new heights.

Going Mainstream

Devyani Chaubal was an Indian journalist and columnist. She is best known for her magazine column, "Frankly Speaking" in the popular Bollywood film magazine Star and Style through the

1960s and 1970s,  and was probably the first author to use Hinglish. Author Shobhaa De then began to use Hinglish elements in her books and columns in the Indian magazine Stardust followed by other Indian authors.

Over the years, Hinglish has been effectively used in Indian advertising in advertising slogans, like Pepsi's 1998 slogan ..

Hinglish: Yeh Dil Maange More! ---- English: This heart desires more!
Hinglish: Yehi hai right choice, Baby --- English: This is the Right Choice, Baby

Hinglish: Yeh Hai Youngistaan--- English: This is the country of the young

In 2003, a trend of Hinglish pop songs was popularized and  in 2005, Baljinder Kaur Mahal wrote a book called The Queen's Hinglish: A full-fledged Hinglish Novel was published by Richa Devesar in March,2015. A dictionary for Hinglish has also been published.

Users

Hinglish is more commonly seen in urban and semi-urban centers of the Hindi-speaking states of India, and has become hugely popular. So much so many speakers do not realize that they are incorporating English words into Hindi sentences or Hindi words into English sentences. Hinglish is also affecting the English spoken in the United Kingdom, with the version of words and expressions used by Indian immigrants and their offspring into colloquial English in the United Kingdom.

Hindi has undergone numerous changes over the years. In periods to come we predict more changes to be in store as well. Should the companies targeting India keep a close watch on the ever changing Hindi language while deciding on entering the Indian market? Let's see what new changes will Hindi or ‘Hinglish’ go through in the future.

The Indian Languages Spread - Evolving Opportunity

We got an inquiry for a potential project, which has all the official languages of India  included and to quote we had to research a bit for dialects, most spoken languages, community and places. This gave me an idea to let know, data researchers and big companies know where they should target their next     expansion in India.

India has 23 constitutionally recognized official languages, written in 13 different scripts, with over 720 dialects. The official Indian languages is Hindi (with approximately 422 million speakers)

 Official languages of India:

Hindi	English	Assamese	Bengali	Bodo
Dogri	Gujarati	Kannada	Kashmiri	Konkani
Maithili	Meitei (Manipuri)	Malayalam	Marathi	Nepali
Odia	Punjabi	Sanskrit	Santali	Sindhi
Tamil	Telugu	Urdu

I had an idea about the top few languages, however, not all of them, but here are the number of speakers in Indian official languages as per the census language data taken from Wikipedia. (Source: Wikipedia) List of languages by number of native speakers (Ordered by number of speakers as first language) The 2001 census recorded all the below languages as having more than 1 million native speakers (0.1% of total population). The languages in list are scheduled languages (the only scheduled language with less than 1 million native speakers is Sanskrit).

Language	2001 census (total population 1,028,610,328 )		1991 census (total population 838,583,988)		Encarta 2007 estimate (worldwide speakers)
	Speakers	Percentage	Speakers	Percentage	Speakers
Hindi	422,048,642	41.1%	329,518,087	39.29%	366 M
Bengali	83,369,769	8.11%	69,595,738	8.30%	207 M
Telugu	74,002,856	7.19%	66,017,615	7.87%	69.7 M
Marathi	71,936,894	6.99%	62,481,681	7.45%	68.0 M
Tamil	60,793,814	5.91%	53,006,368	6.32%	66.0 M
Urdu	51,536,111	5.01%	43,406,932	5.18%	60.3 M
Gujarati	46,091,617	4.48%	40,673,814	4.85%	46.1 M
Kannada	37,924,011	3.69%	32,753,676	3.91%	35.3 M
Malayalam	33,066,392	3.21%	30,377,176	3.62%	35.7 M
Odia	33,017,446	3.21%	28,061,313	3.35%	32.3 M
Punjabi	29,102,477	2.83%	23,378,744	2.79%	57.1 M
Assamese	13,168,484	1.28%	13,079,696	1.56%	15.4 M
Maithili	12,179,122	1.18%	7,766,921	0.926%	24.2 M
Santali	6,469,600	0.63%	5,216,325	0.622%
Kashmiri	5,527,698	0.54%
Nepali	2,871,749	0.28%	2,076,645	0.248%	16.1 M
Sindhi	2,535,485	0.25%	2,122,848	0.253%	19.7 M
Konkani	2,489,015	0.24%	1,760,607	0.210%
Dogri	2,282,589	0.22%
Manipuri	1,466,705*	0.14%	1,270,216	0.151%
Bodo	1,350,478	0.13%	1,221,881	0.146%

The top language Hindi is the most widely spoken language in Northern parts of India. According to 2001 Census even though 45% of Indian population know Hindi, only 25% of them have declared Hindi as their native language or mother tongue. Indian English is recorded as the native language of 226,449 Indians in the 2001 Census. Seeing the trend of growth rate in Census language data from 1991 to 2001 we are expecting to have some similar growth rate in next census data of 2011 which is still pending to publish.

Importance of Language

I was just trying to purchase something online and came across a page which is in some other language with the details of product I was willing to have and then it took me back step to process for payment further as I did not have an understanding of the language and just thought to share the same experience with you as it is very predictable that “If you can’t read it, you’re not buying it”.

Still, I feel there are lots of companies have doubts, if it makes sense for them to globalize their websites. There are some sites available to get the instant translation, then and their however, no guarantee for the accurate info as sometimes the words or sentences are so goofed up and could be understood in an incorrect manner.

There is no doubt that Language is a vital tool to have your prospects converted into customers, “if I can read it, I am buying it”. So having your website available in multi language (translated websites) depending on your target locals and more good if you can have localized versions available on your translated websites, nothing but the fine-tune versions of the translated website to make it sound local which ultimately helps you to connect your Target audience.

Few points which I feel,  why companies should be investing in localization services.

More Sales:
The more understanding you have when you have the information placed on internet via localizing the content, whether it’s a product or services you are selling, more chances to have your prospect as customers.

Add value to your Business/Clients:
Localization is the finest way to showcase your clients that you care whether they are based in your local city or  in any foreign country. It brings additional value to business and shows the respects towards,  local history, language particulars, culture, traditions etc..and ultimately helps you to expand business by the driving force of content localization.

Reducing Risks:
A good understanding of your customers for the product or service information, would help you to serve them with their precise requirements. It could be any minor detail considering colors, numbers, size, material, preferred time anything considering a product or service. It would help your business practices to serve with much accuracy.

The Punch in Marketing:
Marketing campaign works at best when it has good understanding  and without localization it seems a bit difficult to have your information available to your target audience. A good campaigning or advertisement works well when you have it localized as per your target audience. It helps you to establish your brand.

I believe, Localization benefits the businesses and provides you a truly successful way to your customers.

Translation & Localization: How do you have the process set for TEP projects?...

Translation & Localization: How do you have the process set for TEP projects?
...: How do you have the process set for TEP projects? We have the set process for our Translation+Editing+Proofreading projects which helps u...

How do you have the process set for TEP projects?

We have the set process for our Translation+Editing+Proofreading projects which helps us to assist our client in effective and efficient way.

*Please click on the image to enlarge.

Strength of In-House Translators Model

I always wanted to write a blog about this topic as we have a real good in-house team set up of 150+ linguists resources for all the Indian languages.The In-house translators model is a very powerful solution, which actually helps teams to provide seamless services and churn out some super quick translations. 

As we know there are two widely accepted models for translators in the industry: In-house & Freelance. I throw my weight behind the In-house model, since having an in-house team to work on your translation project ensures quality, scalability and more possibilities of successful completion. Although many freelance translators also ensure a fantastic job, there are supreme benefits associated with an in-house translation team.

For example, Webdunia has two production centers in India (City: Indore & Chennai) from where our in-house teams operate. The first advantage we have observed with in-house teams is that before including any translator as a part of our team we can have an initial training session organized based on strengths/weaknesses of each translator.

Training sessions are generally organized for:

• Product Style guides/Language specific style guides
• Trados (and other CAT tools)
• Translation Terminologies, term creation, writing style selection for various domains
• Translation of tricky source material (marketing material, highly flowery language etc.)
• LQA commenting/error declaration/Defending LQA results
• Softskills- email writing/responding to linguistic queries
• Quality assessment and control
• Use of customer specific style guides/ tone
• General proficiency, such as headers, footers, pictures, comments, track changes etc.

The Benefits of choosing an in-house team for your Translation project:

Speed: Quick turn around time.
e.g. A client needs a 50,000 words project of multilingual translation, turning round in 6 days. Though it may not be an uphill task, without a cohesive team it will be very challenging to deliver with the right kind of quality and consistency. However, having an in-house team in place saves a lot of time, which can ultimately be used to bolster quality and consistency.  Thus, in-house team means more time given to translators rather than to the agency and its PMs.

Upscaling could be easier to handle when we have in-house team as PMs could check the progress of the project and based on the urgency they could change the team size. Also, the client can at any time push a few more thousand words without making the entire schedule go haywire.

Consistency

While there may be many translators, CAT tools and sharing TMs within the same premises assures that all churn out a similar quality. Since these in-house personnel have undergone a training to follow certain writhing styles, it becomes easy for the reviewers to give a thoroughly consistent product at the end. Inconsistency seriously impacts quality.

Reliability

Having an experienced team in an in-house set up who truly enjoys working means you are sure of hitting the deadline or even beating it, while quality has already been taken care of!

Maintaining standards

Regular meetings of our in-house teams including translators, proofreaders, PMs and other team mates ensure any linguistic issues that arose during a translation project can be thoroughly discussed and sorted. Valid and valuable suggestions from team members can be used to improve the quality bar, which is possible only in an in-house set-up.

Access to resources

Since translation teams are in-house, any last minute changes, requests, additions, word count spikes can be well communicated to the team and absorbed. Thus, having translators in the vicinity of the PM team is always beneficial.

Thus, in my opinion, the In-house translation model ensures a quality outcome, and it’s an efficient and effective way which works best for most clients. Please feel free to write back for any of your queries. Contact Email

TEP-Three Step Process for Quality Translation

All companies working with multilingual content to cater to world markets may not be familiar with the acronym “TEP”. TEP is a keynote of most translation agencies’ usual workflow to maintain quality throughout the projects. It refers to the three most common stages of any translation project as Translation+Editing+Proofreading. These three steps are essential for each translation/localization projects’ high-quality final output.

TEP is considered as the best practice of translation. A proper TEP sequence ensures superior quality since the text does undergo editing and proofreading process. A proofreader of a Target text checks the source text and therefore know whether a sentence is true to the original text. It verifies that it is legible and has no grammatical errors. The quality of the text, however, is guaranteed if well qualified resources are deployed for Translation and Proofreading process separately, who possess a thorough knowledge of the projects’ domain.

                                                 

It is always suggested that a three step service should be purchased while it is often the expensive option and even more expensive when companies choose to hire two different suppliers instead of one for full process.


There are many companies which do not work with a single vendor for the entire TEP process, probably due to unsurety for the deployment of multiple resources in the TEP process of one project . So it is more likely that they choose two separate suppliers, one for Translation and other one for Editing+Proofreading however this is a more expensive option.

TEP seems a bit more difficult in case of freelancer as there is generally one person who takes care for the complete project so most probably same person will do the proofreading. However, in case of translation agencies it is more likely to get TEP done by multiple resources. There are many Translation agencies who follow the full process as Translation>Editing>Proofreading with multiple resources and to ensure this, they can typically deliver two separate files i.e. Translated and Reviewed. This helps clients’ to track changes made by the reviewer after translation.

When hiring a translation service agency, it is required to know that agency fulfills with these three basic steps (TEP), so that the quality is up to the mark and meets your expectations to have a long run business relationship set-up.

Please feel free to write back for any of your queries. Contact Email.