New improved Google Transliteration available in Labs

http://www.google.com/transliterate

Google Transliteration offers an option for converting Roman characters to their phonetic equivalent in your language. 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. For example, typing "hamesha" transliterates into Hindi as: and typing "salaam" transliterates into Persian as:

Transliteration is available for the following thirteen languages: Arabic, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Persian, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. Transliteration is available in Blogger, Gmail, Knol, Orkut and as a bookmarklet. You can also enable it on your website using the transliteration API. Not all product integrations are available for all languages, see our coverage matrix below for details of language support for each product.



The Transliteration toolbar and its main functions are shown in the image below. The details of how to use Google Transliteration are explained in the subsequent sections.

You will see a drop down list of supported languages on the top left of the edit bar. Click on the drop-down list to select from the supported set of languages.

If you are not able to find the word you are looking for even after using the suggestion menu (see the Correcting and editing words section), you can use the character selector to build your word character by character. To bring up the character selector, click on the icon in the toolbar. You will see a list of characters available in your language. Now you can form your word by selecting a sequence of characters. When you are done, click on the OK button to paste the word into the main editing area.

Dictionary

Google Transliteration has integrated with Google Dictionary to provide a convenient in-place method to look up word meanings across languages. To use this functionality, highlight the word you would like to look up and click on the Dictionary button. Google Transliteration will show you the meaning of the word. If the word you highlighted was in your language, the Dictionary will show you what it means in English. Conversely, if the word you highlighted was in English, the Dictionary will show you the meaning in your language.

Supported Products

Transliteration is available in the following services:

• GMail


• Knol


• API


• Orkut scraps


• Blogger


• Bookmarklet

Note that not all integrations are available for all languages. Our current coverage matrix is given below:

Product	Supported Transliteration Languages
Gmail	Arabic, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Persian, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu
Knol	Arabic, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Persian, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu
API	Arabic, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Persian, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu
Bookmarklet	Arabic, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Persian, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu
Blogger	Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu.
Orkut scraps	Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu.

http://www.google.com/transliterate