Snooping around Google Labs as I’m often prone to do, I came across something called Google Transliteration.

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 17 languages: Arabic, Bengali, Greek, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Persian, Punjabi, Russian, Sanskrit, Serbian, 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.

I’m particularly excited because my Indian mother-tongue, Gujarati is included in the mix and is a feature that I will be using a lot. Whilst I learnt to read and write Gujarati script from a young age, it’s been almost 20 years since I was forced to attend willingly attended Sunday Gujarati school and I’m now extremely rusty.

This was made painfully apparent to me last weekend when I tried to write something heartfelt and meaningful in my Grandma’s birthday card and ended up scrawling in schoolboy script the Gujarati equivalent of “Dear gran, love Rakesh” (yes, that is my real name!).

The problem for me isn’t that I can’t speak the language – it’s just that I can’t write it particularly well.

Gujarati isn’t the most complex eastern script but it is far more difficult to master than our Roman alphabet. The Gujarati writing system is an abugida, in which each base consonantal character possesses an inherent vowel, that vowel being a [?]. For postconsonantal vowels other than a, the consonant is applied with diacritics, while for non-postconsonantal vowels (initial and post-vocalic positions), there are full-formed characters. With a being the most frequent vowel, this is a convenient system in the sense that it cuts down on the width of writing.

Google’s new transliteration feature will help me communicate with my Grandmother much easier and will allow me to send her imprompt postcards which will hopefully put a smile on her cheeky little face (I LOVE that woman)!

[Click here to view the above demo directly on YouTube]

Typing phonetically

Once you have selected your target language, you can start typing a word just the way it sounds in your language using English letters. Once you finish typing a word and hit the SPACE bar, the word will be converted to your local language script. There is a set of formatting and editing controls you can use to change text color, add hyperlinks and perform other formatting operations.

In most cases, the transliterated word is correct. However, sometimes the transliteration may not be what you were looking for. In order to give you more control, Google transliteration provides a list of suggestions that you can select from. This is the silver lining for me! You can bring up the suggestion menu by clicking on the word or by hitting the BACKSPACE key at the end of the word (note that if there is a space after the word, you will need to backspace twice) or by CLICKING on the word. For example:

If the suggestion menu still does not give you the word you are looking for, Google Transliteration provides an advanced editing option in which you can construct the word character by character.

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.

It seems that every week Google brings out a new feature that is full of awesomeness. Or as we say in Gujarati:

Transliteration is available in the following services:

• GMail
• Knol
• API
• Orkut scraps
• Blogger
• Bookmarklet

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