Global support for transliteration

Rahul Roy- Chowdhury, Product Manager.

Most of us use the keyboard to enter text. This is one of the key actions that we perform on your computer. However, not all languages ​​are typing - a simple matter. If you've ever tried to type non-Latin text in Latin keyboard, you know how it can be difficult. Many of us, members of the Google office in the Indian city of Bangalore, is directly confronted with the problem. In India the use of Latin keyboard is normal, but it makes typing in the national languages. To solve this problem, we have launched a service called. Google Transliteration. That makes it easy and convenient to carry out the phonetic input, using letters. Google Transliteration enables you to convert letters into their corresponding phonetic equivalents in your language. Note that in this case it is not a translation of the text, the conversion of words from one alphabet to another, based on sound similarity. For example, if you type 'hamesha', it will be transliterated into Hindi as a. , 'Salaam' will appear in Farsi in the form. And typed in English layout 'spasibo ... Since the initial launch of the system for one of the languages ​​of India, a lot of work has been done to improve the quality, additional languages ​​are added and new features.

Today we are glad to present you a new, improved version of the Google Transliteration. It is available through the. Google Labs. or at. google. com / transliterate.

In the new version you can select any of the seventeen supported languages ​​:. Arabic. ,. Bengali. ,. Greek. ,. Gujarati. ,. Kannada. ,. Malayalam. ,. Marathi. ,. Nepali. ,. Punjabi. ,. Russian. ,. Sanskrit. ,. Serbian. ,. Tamil. ,. Telugu. ,. Urdu. ,. Farsi. and. Hindi. You can also use the rich text formatting as well as to find definitions of words in the built-in dictionaries. If the suggested transliteration you do not like, you can highlight a word and look for other options. To further increase the flexibility of typing, we offer you a selection panel of characters in the encoded. Unicode.

The system is integrated with Google Transliteration. a number of Google products. In addition, we offer you. API. interface and application - specific bookmarklets that let you use Google Transliteration to other sites. The application, which we initially created to solve problems typical of India, is now used in many other countries around the world. This is one example of how the power and scope of technology can help a person in an increasingly globalized.