Just to correct a common misconception among western folks, Urdu is not intelligible to present day Indians. After 1947, the Indian government change the writing script of the most popular lingua franca (in northern areas) to Sanskrit and called it Hindi. Consequently, Urdu in India is now limited to sections of Muslim population.

Urdu, written and spoken, however, is thriving in Pakistan as it is mandatory part of school education (grades 1-12). Contrary to stats on the wikipedias about mother tongue, all schooled Pakistanis are proficient in Urdu. Most of ur.wikipedians hail from Pakistan.

Some folks on http://www.urduweb.org/en/ have done translation (albeit of poor quality) for some software. You may contact the localization team there as there might be some interest in the translatewiki project. The ur.wikipedia volunteers can hardly keep up with the betawiki translation.

2009/10/7 Casey Brown <lists@caseybrown.org>
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Siebrand Mazeland <s.mazeland@xs4all.nl>
Date: Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 11:23 AM
Subject: [Wikimediaindia-l] India, home to the largest spoken
languages in the world: A localisation opportunity
To: wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Cc: translators-l@lists.wikimedia.org


Dear Wikimedians from India.

For those who do not know me, I am a staff member of
http://translatewiki.net, a project where most of the translation of
MediaWiki is done. MediaWiki is the software used by all wikis of the
Wikimedia Foundation. There is more to translatewiki, but I hope you may
discover that later.

Thank you.

Siebrand Mazeland
translatewiki.net staff

[1]
http://translatewiki.net/wiki/Project:MediaWiki_localisation_in_the_50_most_
spoken_languages
[2] http://www.mediawiki.org