Urdu translations incorporated into HRC, OCRE, and CRRO

Thanks to translations provided by Dr. Asma Ibrahim, curator at the State Bank of Pakistan Museum, Urdu user interface translations have been incorporated into the Numishare framework. Urdu has been activated in Online Coins of the Roman Empire, Coinage of the Roman Republic Online, and all of the NEH-funded Hellenistic Royal Coinages sub-projects (Hellenistic typologies in the Inventory of Greek Coin Hoards database). These Numishare collections have been reindexed into Apache Solr, so that Nomisma.org concepts with Urdu labels are integrated into the user interface. There are not many Urdu labels for Greek and Roman numismatics so far--these have primarily been harvested from Wikidata.org and therefore reflect the coverage of articles from the Urdu language version of Wikipedia. That is to say, many notable entities, such as Alexander the Great, Augustus, or mints, such as Athens, Rome, etc. have relevant articles in Wikipedia, but not denominations or less notable people or corporate bodies.

 

Seleucid Coins (part 1), no. 278, a hemidrachm from Bactria.

This is the first of numerous deliverables for the Oxford-ANS OXUS-INDUS project to publish Bactrian and Indo-Greek typologies through the Hellenistic Royal Coinages umbrella. One of the chief aims of the project is to enhance discoverability and accessibility of Central and South Asian cultural materials to the residents of those regions. We hope to provide translations in other relevant languages in advancement of this goal, and this includes filling in gaps in translations for Nomisma.org URIs. Our analytics suggest that translations of Numishare interfaces into Arabic, Turkish, Bulgarian, and other non-Western European languages has directly contributed into increased usage of our open digital resources in Turkey, North Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. The introduction of Urdu into the interface is the first modern language in an area that covers the easternmost extent of Hellenistic cultural contact.