Sunday, September 23, 2007

Google Transliteration: Write Hindi In English

Yeah, you heard me right!! You can type English alphabets and get corresponding Hindi text. Its called transliteration and should not be mixed with translation. Translation in this case would mean, finding a Hindi word which has the same meaning as an English word, whereas transliteration means, finding a Hindi word which sounds like the English word. Go here if you wish to play (and work) with Google's Indic Transliteration Web Application.

Google released this application for Indians to play with about a month back, and I saw it about 2 days after launch. But a lot of people who use other indian language typing softwares, still don't know about it. I thought this post will help them, since I find this application extremely useful and use it quite often!! Congratulations & praise to Google for making this application. Its really not easy to make such an application, and it works nearly perfectly. And they gave it free!! Dont we all love google for their free stuff !!??

The good part about this application is that you can copy-paste the output to any html file. It really can't get any simpler than this. No copying fonts, no complex software, no clicking on an on-screen keyboard, just type and see the output. For me its a winner application and I see in my blogger account that Google is using the same application with blogger as well. Its a javascript that they are using to render into the textarea. So its simple to import into any other application Google wishes to.

PS: Does anyone know if you can use this javascript in your own webpage or application?? (With Google's permission obviously). I've tried the FAQ as well as had a hard time trying to understand the Google TOS.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

You can add the transliteration igoogle gadget to your page.
see this :
http://groups.google.com/group/google-india-labs/browse_thread/thread/4cd92e2d2960c025/86462ade027a5cef#86462ade027a5cef

- sneem

Saptarshi Purkayastha said...

No I didn't mean that. I know you can use the iGoogle Gadget. I'm thinking of using that app on another webapp or desktop application which uses the service that the javascript from that page is using!!??

Ayush said...

Writing in Hindi has become so simple after Indic. The ways of using the widgets are also defined.
Thats really amazing.
Hindi websites and blogs are increasing over the web day by day.
I have also started my own Hindi blog.
Also I did come across this Hindi webs stats tool over the web to use for my blogs - http://gostats.in

It is an amazing tool because its in Hindi. I think its the only HIndi counter as I did not find any other after long hours of searches too.