For my project I had a consent form that I needed to get people I filmed to sign, just to say they were ok with being in the film and such. I had this all typed out and ready to go before I even entered the field. The only remaining work to do was that I needed to get the form translated for those who didn’t read or speak very much English. And because I was working with Tibetans and Inidans I was going to need to get it translated twice. Once in Tibetan and once in Hindi.
I found people who could translate fairly early, within the first two or three weeks in McLeod Ganj, but then it was another little while to actually translate them. A Tibetan friend of ours who translated the Tibetan form had a friend who could type in Tibetan, so he was able to give me a file with it all typed out and ready to go. But the Indian woman (and also close friend) who translated the Hindi version, didn’t have a computer, and thus gave me a handwritten copy of the Hindi document.
I figured all I had to do was take it to an internet café and ask one of the owners if I could pay them to type it up for me. The only problem was, everyone I asked responded that they didn’t know how to type in Hindi. I was kind of surprised. I just expected that that was something everybody would know how to do. The keyboards were all in English characters, but I knew there must be a way to type in Hindi. I asked several people, but finally decided just to figure it out myself.
Well there’s a probably a good reason nobody I talked to knew how to type in Hindi, and that’s because it is complicated. And even more complicated for me. I know the basic Hindi alphabet and what sounds the different characters make, but I hardly knew any of the words written on the document. So mostly I just had to do my best and hope the words I was typing were the same words that were on the page.
For anyone wondering, there are a couple different ways to go about typing Hindi. First of all, Google has a great thing called “transliteration” which you can use through e-mail or download for PCs. With this, you just type in English characters what the word sounds like and then the program will automatically convert it into the word in Hindi (or any other number of languages). So you just type “Namaste” and it turns it into: नमसते
I tried this approach for a while, but could only do it when I was on the internet because the computer I had with me was a mac. Finally I switched to Macs Hindi character keyboard which just allows you to type, substituting Hindi characters for each of the keys on the keyboard. For basic words it’s fairly easy because in most cases you just type the English character that sounds like the Hindi character. But in Hindi there are a lot more characters than English, so then you have to start using the command, control, and option keys, and then combinations of those three. That’s when it starts getting hard to find what you want.
Well I finally got it all typed out, but then I went and showed it to the woman who had translated and she just laughed because I had gotten so many words wrong.
Luckily I was able to get another good friend to sit down with me for a couple hours over a couple days and go over the entire document and correct all the mistakes I had made.
The whole process was quite a pain, but hey, now I know how to type in Hindi! I don’t know if that’s a skill I’ll be using a lot in the rest of my life, but it’s a nice accomplishment at least.
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