Gmail Email Now Available In Most Indian Languages

[prakashseth]

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For those of you who prefer to communicate in Hindi but did not have an easy way to type and send e-mail in your language of choice, Gmail has something to offer you. Google has launched a new feature in Gmail that makes it easy to type e-mail in Indian languages.

When you compose a new mail in Gmail, you should now see an icon with an Indian character. This feature is enabled by default for Gmail users in India. If you do not see this function enabled by default, you will need to go the "Settings" page and enable this option in the "Language" section.

Once you click the Indian languages icon, you can type words the way they sound in English and Gmail will automatically convert the word to its Indian local language equivalent. For example, if a Hindi speaker types "namaste", it will get transliterated to its phonetically equivalent Hindi text.

Gmail currently supports five Indian languages -- Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam. So you can select the language of your choice from the drop-down list next to the icon.

According to Chandramouli Mahadevan, software engineer, Google, "We built this new feature using Google's transliteration technology, which is also available on Google India Labs, Orkut, Blogger and iGoogle. I hope you find this feature useful to communicate with those of your friends and family who prefer to write in their native language, and it will be available soon to businesses and schools using Google Apps. Now back to replying to all those Hindi e-mails I got from my family and friends today!"

Google's Gmail service will celebrate its fifth birthday tomorrow. Gmail, known as Google Mail in Germany, Austria and the United Kingdom, was made available to the public by Google on 1 April 2004, after extensive rumours of its existence during testing. Five years after its launch, Gmail now offers over 7GB of storage but is still labelled as a beta version.

[Arval]

You’ve seen Gmail in Hindi but now this popular email program from Google is available in all major languages of India including اردو (Urdu) , मराठी (Marathi), हिन्दी (Hindi), বাংলা (Bangla), ગુજરાતી (Gujarati), ଓଡିଆ (Oriya), தமிழ் (Tamil), తెలుగు (Telugu), ಕನ್ನಡ (Kannada) and മലയാളം (Malayalam).

I think this would cover 90% of the 1 billion strong population of India.

To switch to a different language in Gmail, go to the Settings tab and selection a different languages from the Gmail display language drop down. Don’t forget to save your changes.

[Dharmavira]

To change the language view in Gmail, you have to do the following:

1. Sign in to Gmail.
2. Click Settings at the top of any Gmail page.
3. Select a language from the Gmail display language: drop-down menu in the Language section.
4. Click Save Changes.

The Gmail interface will appear in the language of your choice after you click Save Changes. However, your Gmail's display language doesn't affect the language in which your messages are sent and received.

Some of the features available in the English language setting may not be available when you select another language setting. Google added that it's working towards making all of Gmail's features available in every language setting.

[Ayush]

When you compose a new mail in Gmail, you will now see an icon with a Hindi character. This is enabled by default for Gmail users in India. If you don't see this function enabled by default, you can go to the "Settings" page and enable this option in the "Language" section.

When you click on the Indian languages icon, you can type words the way they sound in English and Gmail will automatically convert the word to its Indian local language equivalent.

This new feature will also be available on Google India Labs, Orkut, Blogger and iGoogle.