Indian language support in WordPress

Currently my site seems to have some Unicode problem so all kannada characters are messed up. Root cause seems to be a wrong database collation after an import into a new database. Btw thanks to the super support of Weblogs.us, this site is powered by a lot more powerful and reliable server and database now!

Many have already used Quillpad so far, but I was looking for some kind of WordPress plugin that integrates into WordPress, allowing users to type directly in Kannada. Came across a nice one from Monusoft but can’t enable it yet till this Unicode issue is fixed.

Happened to come across the making of Quillpad…

From the NY TIMES – By DANIEL SORID
Published: December 30, 2008

The next chapter of the World Wide Web will not be written in English alone. Asia already has twice as many Internet users as North America, and by 2012 it will have three times as many. Already, more than half of the search queries on Google come from outside the United States.

The globalization of the Web has inspired entrepreneurs like Ram Prakash Hanumanthappa, an engineer from outside Bangalore, India. Mr. Ram Prakash learned English as a teenager, but he still prefers to express himself to friends and family members in his native Kannada. But using Kannada on the Web involves computer keyboard maps that even Mr. Ram Prakash finds challenging to learn.

So in 2006 he developed Quillpad, an online service for typing in 10 South Asian languages. Users spell out words of local languages phonetically in Roman letters, and Quillpad’s predictive engine converts them into local-language script. Bloggers and authors rave about the service, which has attracted interest from the cellphone maker Nokia and the attention of Google Inc., which has since introduced its own transliteration tool.