Yahoo! India adds Bengali to its local language base

At the Wikimedia conference, Jimmy Wales had sought more contribution from local Indian languages. Now, Yahoo! plans to further extend its local Indian language base to deliver digital content for Internet users. Yahoo! India has announced its partnership with one of the leading dailies in Bengali, Anandabazar Patrika (ABP). The partnership aims at delivering premium digital content to Internet users in Bengali. Combining editorial strengths of Anandabazar Patrika and Yahoo! India, the co-branded property has been named, Bengali.yahoo.com.

Living on new terms...

The latest launch is fourth in the series of language partnerships. After Hindi, Tamil and Marathi, Kannada, Telugu, Gujarati, Yahoo! India now turns towards offering digital content in Bengali. Users familiar with the language can now look forward to reading news from varying categories, like politics, sports, entertainment news across the world and also local news from in and around Kolkata. The site will also showcase articles from ABP’s supplements like Pustak Porichoy offering book reviews, Kolkatar Korcha (snippets from Kolkata), Baracharcha offering celebrity interviews, Natyo Samalochana providing theatre reviews, Probondho that offers essays. Yahoo! had also introduced its free online video service, late last year.

Commenting on this launch Arun Tadanki, Managing Director of Yahoo! India and South East Asia said “The launch of Bengali on Yahoo! India is another milestone in our journey to expand language portfolio with a view to make our content relevant for new Internet users who seek to consume content in their own language. Yahoo!’s reach combined with ABP’s vast experience in generating and serving Bengali content will provide a superior digital content experience to Bengalis around the world.”

Built on the Yahoo! Publishing Platform, the site is jointly managed by Yahoo! and My Ananda Bazar Patrika. I-Cube report by IAMAI points out that Indian language audience has been growing at a rate of nearly 40 percent per year. Moreover, the next wave of digital audience in India is said to emerge from the non-English speaking population. The statistics show a large base of Internet users in India who are eager to access digital content in their own language.