We launched our first transliteration application on Google India Labs two years ago: it let users type in Hindi using an english keyboard. Since then we've expanded our coverage to nine Indian languages (Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Tamil, and Telugu). We have also added the transliteration feature to several Google products such as Blogger, Knol, Orkut, Gmail and iGoogle. For other products, we released an API that lets 3rd party sites embed this technology at no charge. However, the most common user feedback we still receive is requests to add transliteration to even more products. We are actively working on simplifying the use of Indian languages on more websites.

With that in mind, we are happy to announce the launch of a new feature, Transliteration Bookmarklets, that will let you use transliteration on a website that does not support it currently. Transliteration Bookmarklets is a browser-based application that lets you type in your language in any text box on any website and gets added to your browser much like a regular bookmark.

For example, you can use them to:
  • Chat with your friends in your language using Gmail chat.
  • Search for Google news articles.
  • Send messages in your language on your favorite social networks.
  • Create or edit wikipedia pages in your language.

Once you install the bookmarklet on your favorite browser (we support Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari), you can simply turn transliteration on/off in the browser itself.

To get started, click on the links for one of our supported languages and follow the instructions on the page: Arabic, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu. Alternatively, you can follow the links at http://code.google.com/p/t13n/.

Type away, and let us know what you think.

Posted by Sarveshwar Duddu, Software Engineer