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.

Selecting your transliteration language

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.

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.

Correcting and editing words

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. 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. See the section below on advanced editing options for details.

Advanced editing options

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.

          

Arabic transliteration supports a special way to use numeral representations for characters; refer to the section on using numeral representation for details.

Urdu transliteration supports entering phrases; refer to the section on phrases for details.

Switching between English and transliteration language

In some situations, you may want to type a mix of words in English and the local language. To switch between English and your selected language, you can type CONTROL+G ( ⌘+G on Mac) to move between languages.

Pressing SHIFT + SPACE after a word (instead of SPACE) skips the transliteration of the previous word. For example, if you want to keep the word "Google" in English, type "Google" and press SHIFT+SPACE. This feature can also be used to skip transliteration of numbers.

Using the 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.

Right to Left Support

Google Transliteration supports three languages - Arabic, Persian and Urdu - that are written right to left. If you select one of these languages, your page should automatically switch to right to left editing. You can manually control the editing mode by clicking on the    icon to enable right to left editing.

Using numeral representations in Arabic transliteration

Because of the nature of this system, there is no single "correct" way to write an Arabic character (e.g., "ج" might be transliterated as "j" or "g"). Normally, Arabic letters are represented by a letter (or a combination of letters) that are phonetically equivalent (or nearly equivalent) in English. For example, "ب" can be represented as "b", "ت" as "t", "ث" as "th", and some may represent "ط" as "t". Arabic letters that do not have a close phonetic approximate in the Latin alphabet are often represented using numerals, or numerals followed by an apostrophe(`) or a single quote ('). These numerals are chosen so that they graphically approximate the corresponding Arabic letters (e.g., "ع" is represented using the numeral "3"). The following table summarizes those special numerals:

Arabic Letter	Numeral Representation
ء	2
ح	7
خ	7'
خ	5
ص	9
ض	9'
ط	6
ظ	6'
ع	3
غ	3'
ق	8 or 9

Typing phrases in Urdu

To transliterate phrases such as nawa-e-waqt (نواے وقت), you can try variations like nawa waqt (by dropping the "e" part completely) or nawae waqt (by appending the "e" to the previous word) or nawa e waqt (by removing the intervening hyphen characters). A few other examples are listed below :

• Type haal dil to get حال دل (haal-e-dil)
• Type asalam alaikum to get اسلام علیکم (asalam-o-alaikum)
• Type quran o sunnat to get قرآن و سنّت (quran-o-sunnat)

The Transliteration page uses Unicode to encode the local language characters. Unicode is a system of representing text and symbols and is supported by all modern browsers and operating systems. If you do not see these characters being correctly represented, you may need to either enable complex script layout support or install Unicode fonts.

If you use Internet Explorer 6+ in Windows Vista/XP/2000, you should have no problems in viewing and editing text correctly. Mozilla Firefox requires support for complex text layout, otherwise it might display the text incorrectly. The support for complex text layout is usually turned off by default, but this Wikipedia article gives a detailed explanation on how to turn it on in various operating systems.

Malayalam characters with chillus may not be rendered correctly on some systems even with complex script rendering enabled, in which case you can refer to this article for solutions to set this right.

Urdu transliteration users can download the Nafees Web Naskh font (developed by CRULP) for better rendering of Urdu text.

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: