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Sify Provides Hindi Translation Services For Bank Websites

Tuesday, 24 July 2007 14:55 Information Madness

I normally visit Google Zeitgeist which gives you a rundown on search behavior in various countries. This gives me a rough idea about what people in India are searching for. I was going through May 2007 report and saw "Andhra bank" among the top 5 searches. So I thought of visiting their website. I must say, I am impressed by the bank and what the bank is doing for its customers.

Andhra Bank is an Indian nationalised commercial bank, founded in 1923 by Dr.Bhogaraju Pattabhi Sitaramayya. The Bank has 1,179 branches as of September, 2005. Andhra Bank is the pioneer in introducing Credit Cards in India during the early eighties. (WikiPedia)

I know this is an off off topic discussion and doesn't match with the title of the story but stay with me for a moment, I will get to it soon.

The Bank had previous domain name www.andhrabank-india.com which is now redirecting to www.andhrabank.in. The bank is dipslaying a message on their homepage about their new official website which is www.andhrabank.in. Few features of this bank really caught my attention.

Andhra Bank's Mobile Biometric ATMs which was launched in Hyderabad on 21st June this year. The bank has rolled out two mobile biometric ATMs, one for Hyderabad and one for Secunderabad. These buses would stop at locations scheduled by the RBI. The site has provided the schedule on their website (here is the link http://www.andhrabank.in/scripts/MobileBiometricATMs.aspx). If you want to use this, you need to register your finger prints with the branch which maintains your account. These machines would also have PIN facilities if one wants to use PIN instead of finger prints.

Andhra Bank is the first bank in the country to launch mobile biometric ATMs and the bank has plans to expand this facilities to other places soon.

Now here is the thing, Andhra Bank gives you an option to view the site in Hindi. So when I clicked on the link, to my surprise the URL was http://demo83.sify.net/abhindi/. Hmm!! So what should I conclude from this ? Probably Sify.net is currently providing "hindi translation" services to different bank websites ??

So I started guessing their "naming convention" as one can see from their URL: demo83.sify.net/abhindi, ab stands for Andhra Bank. Just out of curiosity, I guess Punjab National Bank - and entered http://demo83.sify.net/pnbhindi and walah!! I saw Punjab National Bank's Hindi version. So then I guessed /sbhindi - and walah Syndicate Bank's Hindi version.

As the URL suggests, I think its still in Beta (http://demo83) but I am not sure. If you click on Hindi Menu links, some of them open up in a regular English version page. So is it something that everybody knew about Sify ? Or Sify is still working on it and will make a public announcement later ?

Whatever it is, I enjoyed discovering this thing. :-)