Google Indic Transliteration for Indian Languages


Google Indic Transliteration offers an option for converting Roman characters to the Malayalam characters. This lets you type Malayalam words phonetically in English script (‘in the so called Manglish‘) and still have them appear in their correct alphabet. Note that this is not the same as translation – it is the sound of the words that are converted from one alphabet to the other, not their meaning. Using this feature is very easy. You can just type the words in English letters. For example, when I type in sukhamano? in English, this will be automatically converted into corresponding Malayalam letters. This has never been this simple!

Google Indic Transliteration available in Malayalam, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Kannada.


When you are simply typing as usual in Manglish, a more dynamic, complex algorithm is used to determine the correct characters to use, based on the sound of each overall word. Whenever you press the space bar or enter, the the letters are send to Google servers for mapping to the correct Malayalam word. That means, you need to be connected the Internet for using this feature. I hope that Google will soon come up with an offline version for Google Indic Transliteration.

While in the edit mode, a static mapping will be used. You don’t really need to remember the mapping in order to use the editor. The complex algorithm used by Google automatically converts most of the Roman characters into Malayalam characters in Unicode. Only the Unicode Malayalam characters are searchable on Google. Try it, use it and start writing your blog in your regional language!

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