How to create Drupal site in Marathi (Devnagari)

I read a few posts asking guidelines on creating a Drupal site in Marathi (Devnagari) - a language spoken in western part of India. As there is neither standard Marathi translation nor any Marathi language specifc help is available, I thought of writing a small set of steps / guidelines for creating a Drupal based website in Marathi language ( rather any Indian Language for which Unicode fonts are available)

Although I have created Marathi websites using Drupal 4.7 & 5.1, this article applies to Drupal 5.1 only.

To create a Drupal site in Marathi, you may follow these steps:

- Install Drupal!
- Create first (Admin) user account
- Login as administrator to the newly created site
- Go to Administer > Site Building > Modules (/admin/build/modules)
- Enable Locale module
- Go to Administer > Site Configuration > Localization (/admin/settings/locale)
- Click on add language tab
- From the drop down of languages, select Marathi & click on Add language button
- On the Languages list page, you will now see mr (Marathi) as a language, enable it & make it default

Now you might expect that suddenly the entire site will appear in Marathi, but nothing like this will happen! Now you will need to 'translate' default English 'Strings' to Marathi one by one.

- To do so, go to Manage Strings Tab on the localization page (admin/settings/locale/strings/search)
- Enter the string / text you wish to translate to Marathi (e.g. Log in)
- If the string is found, a list of all the places where this string is used in Drupal site is displayed.
- In that list, go to the row which you want to translate to Marathi, click on edit
- In the next page enter your own Marathi translation of the string using unicode marathi font & save the string (e.g. Log In = येण्याची नोंद )

Follow these steps for all the labels / strings which are appearing on your site's interface and you are done!!

To avoid this painful process, there is an option of Importing a translation scheme (so we can actually import entire Marathi translation of Drupal interface in a single click). However, unfortunately, there is no standard Marathi Translation of Drupal interface available yet! So we have to wait for someone to write it or follow this string by string translation process!

If you need a Marathi Transliteration Typing interface for your site (so that your users can type in Marathi using normal English keyboards), you may try a module called as UniSaraswati (http://drupal.org/project/unisaraswati) specifically written for this purpose

If you need generic help about computing in Marathi, you may get it on Marathi Wikipedia - http://mr.wikipedia.org

You may find the examples of marathi sites created using Drupal at:

www.sadha-sopa.com (Drupal 4.7)
www.marathigazal.com (Drupal 5.1)
www.miloonsaryajani.com (Drupal 5.1)

Prasad Shirgaonkar