Transliteration adds 5 new languages

Typing in ones own language is the first step for many users in using a computer and the Internet. To enable that, Transliteration went global at the end of last year, with the addition of 6 non-Indian languages to the initial set of 11 Indian languages.

Today, we are delighted to announce the launch of transliteration support for 5 new languages - Amharic, Tigrinya, Hebrew, Oriya and Sinhalese. With this launch, Google Transliteration supports 22 languages spoken across Africa, South Asia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East. These new languages are currently available in Google Labs or at http://www.google.com/transliterate.

You can select from one of 22 supported languages:
Amharic, Arabic, Bengali, Greek, Gujarati, Hindi, Hebrew, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Persian, Punjabi,Russian, Sanskrit, Serbian, Sinhalese, Tamil, Telugu, Tigrinya and Urdu.

You can also compose richly formatted text and look up word definitions with our dictionary integration. If the default transliteration is not the word you wanted, you can highlight it to see a list of alternatives. For even finer-grained control, we provide a unicode character picker to allow character-by-character composition.

As with all labs products, we will continue to improve the technology and try out new features. We would love to hear from you, so do let us know what you think.

Posted by: Nilesh Tathawadekar and Mohammed Aslam, Software Engineers

Read any text in the script you like

In many parts of the world, people often can often speak a language but not know how to read the script. Are you one of them? If so, Script Converter is the tool for you. Script Converter breaks down the script barrier by allowing you to read text in any script you want.

This tool converts a given web page or piece of text from one script to another. Remember, this does not translate, it transliterates (convert to phonetic equivalent) in a different script. For example, if you can speak Hindi, you know that ‘namaste’ is a greeting in Hindi but you can’t read ‘नमस्ते’ in Hindi script.

Using script converter you can convert ‘नमस्ते’ to 'namaste' in english script, which you can read. Similarly, you can read hindi web pages rendered in english script by giving the URL. To start browsing a website, type the url in the text area, choose your preferred script and press convert.

We currently support 17 languages with 17X17 conversion support: Bengali, English, Greek, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Persian, Punjabi, Russian, Sanskrit, Serbian, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.

Please try it out and let us know what you think and how you're using it.

Posted by New Melchizedec Sundararaj and Mohammed Aslam, Software Engineers

Google Transliteration IME available in fourteen languages

As engineers on the Google Transliteration team, we are very excited to let you know about the launch of the Google Transliteration IME. An IME is an "Input Method Editor" and simply refers to software that lets you type in a language of your choice. Once you download the Google Transliteration IME(it's free and there's no signup required), you can type a word the way it sounds using Latin characters and it will convert the word to its native script. For example, typing "hamesha" transliterates into Hindi as : हमेशा

Google Transliteration IME offers several features focused on an improved user experience, including offline support, word completion, personalized choices, easy-to-use keyboard, quick search and several cool customization options. As a user types, a suggestion menu is displayed with alternatives and word completions. For example, as you type "googl" you will see five options from you can select the correct one.







It is currently available in 14 different languages - Arabic, Bengali, Farsi (Persian), Greek, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. This application enables users to create content or communicate in their preferred language online or offline and in any application of their choice. The Google Transliteration IME currently supports 32-bit Windows 7/Vista/XP. For more information on Google’s Transliteration IME please visit our help page.

Google Transliteration is also available in Blogger, Gmail, Knol, Orkut and as a bookmarklet. You can also enable it on your website using the transliteration API.


Posted by Naren Manappa and Prunthaban Kanthakumar, Software Engineers.

Transliteration goes global

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)

Most of us use a keyboard to enter text; it's one of the most basic activities we perform on a computer. However even this simple activity can be cumbersome in many parts of the world. If you've ever tried to type in a non-Roman script using a Roman keyboard, you know that it can be difficult to do. Many of us at Google's Bangalore office experienced this problem firsthand. Roman keyboards are the norm in India, making it difficult to type in Indian languages. We decided to tackle this problem by making it very easy to type phonetically using Roman characters and we launched this service as Google Transliteration.

Using Google Transliteration you can convert Roman characters to their phonetic equivalent in your language. Note that this is not the same as translation — it's the sound of the words that are converted from one alphabet to the other. For example, typing "hamesha" transliterates into Hindi as: , typing "salaam" transliterates into Persian as: and typing "spasibo" transliterates into Russian as . Since our initial launch for a single Indian language, we've been hard at work on improving quality, adding more languages and new features.

Today we are pleased to introduce a new and improved version of Google Transliteration, available in Google Labs or at http://www.google.com/transliterate.

In this new version, you can select from one of seventeen supported languages: Arabic, Bengali, Greek, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Persian, Punjabi,Russian, Sanskrit, Serbian, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. You can also compose richly formatted text and look up word definitions with our dictionary integration. If the default transliteration is not the word you wanted, you can highlight it to see a list of alternatives. For even finer-grained control, we provide a unicode character picker to allow character-by-character composition.

Google Transliteration is integrated into several Google properties and we have an API and bookmarklets to extend this capability to other websites. A solution we initially built to solve a problem we saw here in India is now being used in many other parts of the world as well - one small example of the scale and leverage that technology can bring in today's increasingly globalized environment. As with all labs products, we will continue to improve the technology and try out new features. We would love to hear from you, so do let us know what you think.


Posted by Nilesh Tathawadekar and Mohammed Aslam, Software Engineers

Google Transliteration now Available in Urdu and Punjabi

We firmly believe that users deserve a great online experience regardless of the language they speak. This belief is what inspired us to build our transliteration service to provide an easy and intuitive way to type in languages for which keyboard support was not available or not widely used. We are happy to announce the launch of transliteration support for Urdu and Punjabi. Transliteration allows users to type words phonetically using their english keyboard. For example, in Urdu, you can type "shukriya" to get شکریہ and in Punjabi, you can type "duniya"to get ਦੁਨਿਯਾ . If a word did not get transliterated correctly, hit the backspace key or select the word to see list of alternatives to select from. Typing Control + G allows you to switch between english and local language typing.

Launching Urdu and Punjabi has been a true labour of love for our team. Urdu brought with it some unique challenges: since it is written right to left, we needed to ensure that editing functions such as backspace, tab, etc all work as expected. Urdu diacriticals, or 'Aerabs', also needed special attention as they map the vowel sounds but are not necessarily visible in the word. For Punjabi, the 'addak', 'tippi' and 'bindi' posed its own challenge as they change the intonation of the previous character. We hope that Urdu and Punjabi speakers in India, Pakistan and elsewhere in the world find this tool useful to type in their native language.

With this launch our transliteration service now supports twelve languages, including: Hindi,Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, Gujarati,Marathi, Nepali and Arabic

As always, we would love to hear from you; let us know what you think.


Posted by Sridatta Chegu and Anupama Dutta, Software Engineers