Internet and Mobile Transliteration Race Heats Up

| 31-12-2008 | Translating English & Spanish | Written by Matthew Bennett

Transliteration is the process of transcribing or mapping words written using the alphabet from one language (e.g. English) into the script of another (e.g. Arabic).

There are now several tech companies racing to provide the chosen interfaces for online and mobile transliteration services and they have beaten Google out of the starting blocks.

Quillpad Indic Language Transliteration Interface (I don

Via a New York Times article this morning comes word of Quillpad, a transliteration service for speakers of 10 Indic languages: Bengali, Gujurati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu.

Quillpad is a free online Hindi typing tool. Now it is very easy to type in Hindi. For example, type ‘aap kaise hain’ in the text field below. Quillpad will convert it directly into Devanagari script. If you write a word like ‘vishesh‘, first sh should become ‘श’ and the second sh should become ‘ष’.

Yamli Arabic Transliteration Service

Google also offers an Indic transliteration service (but only in Tamil, Hindi, Tulugu, Kannada and Malyalam) and an Arabic transliteration service to rival Yamli, a service which was reviewed on Techcrunch in October and which received favourable comments.

It seems Quillpad is also a huge hit amongst Indic speaking early adopters.

These warm welcomes are important and are why Google has joined the race: hundreds of millions of new users are awaiting the companies which manage to connect with and provide tools for speakers of these languages, allowing them to participate on the Internet in their own languages.

Along with hundreds of millions of new users, of course, come hundreds of millions of dollars in new ad revenues and Google has already been accused of over-aggressive and unethical advertising to try and attract new users to its Arabic transliteration tool instead of Yamli.

Do you know of any more transliteration services in your languages?