Whenever we are touching a key on a keyboard for translating anything into Hindi, we are having great responsibility. The responsibility of conveying the message of any source text into Hindi is having the responsibility to convey to the millions of users. And so the problem is acute. Hindi is not just a language in India. Hindi is not just one culture of India. Combine many languages, many cultures, many dialects, many traditions – the one result you will get is Hindi. That is why it is not a simple job to define what really Hindi is? You can find different forms of Hindi from Kashmir to Kanyakumari and From Gujarat to Arunachal Pradesh. That is why translating in Hindi is more challenging job than what generally it is being seen.

Language is like a running water. The field of computer translation is very new and so lot of experiments are happening daily. Till today, in open content zone, there is nothing like a style guide that can be used by normal users. The style guide will be helpful in making the translation continuously better. More fair, More accurate, More consistent. It will try to connect better with the audiences. This is not a simple do and don't. The style & convention guide will try to help translators and interested localization engineers in increasing understandability of several aspects of translating any text in Hindi. This guide will talk about Fonts, Collation, Numerals, Calendar, Acronym, Glossaries, Punctuations, White Spaces, Message Lengths, to name a few. These are the very basic things but these aspects need much attention and also the understanding of these things are mandatory for a translator before translating any text in Hindi.

Questions can arise that following a style guide can be a hindrance in the development of any language. But the fact is that style guide is not a barrier in the development of language but it helps in the development of a language by making any text more useful and understandable for a group of people. Particularly it is important and almost mandatory for technical translation. For example, when we are translating any manual, software etc. some sort of consistency is needed to make user comfortable with the user interface, its manual etc.

A proper communications is very much necessary particularly in the case of Open Source and Free software communities where continuously new translators are joining in their community team and start working on their language. They should know the method and ways by which translation are being done in the community. So there should be some set of guidelines for the volunteers who are coming in the filed of translation. Apart from tools to translate and translators' know how, three important resources are required: 1. Terminology, 2. Translation Style and conventions Guide, and 3. Quality Assessment Guidelines and related Matrix. But we lack the above mentioned resources in Hindi. Particularly in open content there is nothing except some Wikipedia pages that can be freely quoted and used by the community. So this is one move towards creating these resources.

At present, we can say that Hindi is spread over whole of India with different slang and understanding and we should take this point as an important one that as Hindi is understood by a large and different population. So being a translator we need to be more cautious in translating into Hindi. For the wider acceptability and to lessen the confusion, we should follow one particular style and convention for the language. Therefore this guide is prepared for Hindi and its translators and localisers communities.