WebProNews » Transliteration

Google Delves Deeper Into Transliteration

Doug Caverly — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 15:05:00 +0000

As Google’s made certain content and services available for free, some newspaper editors and book publishers have come to loathe the search giant, and it wouldn’t be surprising if translators join that group, too. Late last week, Google took several steps to make switching between languages easier on regular people.

The most mainstream and noticeable change relates to Google Transliteration. This product has begun to support Amharic, Hebrew, Oriya and Sinhalese, and Tigrinya, bringing the total number of supported languages to an even 22.

Then Google’s Input Method Editor, which exists for the purpose of letting people convert words while offline, has also been upgraded with the addition of five new languages (although the group’s slightly different: Amharic, Russian, Sanskrit, Serbian and Tigrinya).

Finally, a post on the Google Translate Blog asked, "Now what if you come across a language that you can speak but can’t read? For example, if you can speak Hindi, you may know that ‘namaste’ is a greeting, however you may not be able to read ‘??????’ in Hindi script. Our new Script Converter tool converts a given web page or piece of text from one script to another so that you can read it phonetically."

And Script Converter supports an impressive 17 languages at the moment: Bengali, English, Greek, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Persian, Punjabi, Russian, Sanskrit, Serbian, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu.

Google Launches New Transliteration Tool

Chris Crum — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 20:22:43 +0000

Google has launched a "new and improved" version of Google Transliteration as a Google Labs experiment. Users can simply go to google.com/transliterate and type in the box to have their words converted to the proper language. There are 17 that are currently supported. Google explains:

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.

The new Google Transliteration is available in GMail, Knol, Orkut, and Blogger, as well as an API and a Bookmarklet for use with other sites. There is also an input method editor available for download.

The new Google Transliteration supports Arabic, Bengali, Greek, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Persian, Punjabi, Russian, Sanskrit, Serbian, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.

Related Articles:

> Google Gives India Semi-Functional Gifts

> Google Takes Another Shot At Transliteration

> Google Puts Its Own Dictionary in the Spotlight

Google Gives India Semi-Functional Gifts

Doug Caverly — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 15:14:02 +0000

Earlier this week, Google promised India a birthday present (the country is celebrating its 60th year of independence). Now two new gadgets have surfaced in Google India Labs, and while they may or not be the gift in question, they’re definitely worth a look.

The first gadget is called “Indic On-Screen Keyboard iGoogle Gadgets,” and it’s described as the “Official Google on-screen keyboard gadget for entering search queries in Hindi.” Admittedly, if you’ve been able to keep up with my English, you probably don’t need this program, but that may be just as well; Google’s posted a 136-word list of “Known Issues.”

Some things don’t function in Firefox, and others don’t work in IE. Safari’s apparently out of the question. If this is India’s anniversary present, it’s almost as if Google said, “Happy birthday, India! Your present’s in a few more pieces than it should be, but we’ll go at it with a hot glue gun in a few hours.”

The other offering, “Google Indic Transliteration,” appears to be much more solid. Type a word in English, hit the space bar, and Google will spit it back in Hindi even as it allows you to continue typing. I can’t comment on the accuracy of the transliterations, but they appear quickly and smoothly (and they always appear – I couldn’t stump the software).

It’s still hard to say if one or both of these gadgets is the gift Google promised – the Official Google Blog stated, “we’ll have news shortly,” and nothing has appeared – but their appearance is at least a happy coincidence. Hat tip to Googlified’s Haochi Chen.

Google Takes Another Shot At Transliteration

Doug Caverly — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 22:17:04 +0000

Translating something from Spanish to English is a neat trick, but both languages use the same alphabet. Google’s looking at something tougher – transliteration – to bridge the gaps between America and several different markets.

To transliterate is, as defined by Dictionary.com, “to change (letters, words, etc.) into corresponding characters of another alphabet or language . . .” This skill would come in handy when dealing with Russian, Chinese, or Arabic, and the Business Standard’s Surajeet Das Gupta reports that Google has launched beta versions of software to handle each of these languages.

Yet the most recent news relates to India. “Technologically, translation and transliteration is possible for local Indian languages,” said Kannan Pashupathy, Google’s director of international operations, in an interview with the Standard. “But I cannot give a time line for their launch. We are working on all products that will be beneficial to Indian users. We must be sure before we come up with a beta product.”

So for now, things are being tested in a very limited capacity. “Google has begun to offer transliteration from English to Hindi on its blogging site, but the Indian R&D team is working on extending the same technology to other products, including email,” states Gupta.

It may not be long before the transliteration software spreads, then – developments at Google India seem to come pretty much one after another. On the other hand, many of Google’s translations are still imperfect, and transliteration poses some much more complex problems.