Google Expands Transliteration Tools and Starts Testing a Virtual Keyboard

We may think of the web as incredibly open and universally available, but, apart from the growing problem of governments blocking or censoring things they don’t like, the language barrier is as much of a problem online as it is in the real world. Google has been working to bridge this gap mostly with its increasingly smart translation technologies. But this is only part of the problem, another major hurdle is that computers and the Internet were designed with Roman languages in mind. This creates a huge hassle for non-Roman scripts and languages, but one that Google is also working on alleviating.  

“Most computer keyboards only allow for the input of Roman characters (the alphabet used by most Western languages) and converting between scripts can be difficult. To make this process easier we launched an improved version of Google Transliteration at the end of last year, a service which enables you to phonetically convert Roman letters into a variety of other scripts,” New Melchizedec Sundararaj, software engineer at Google, wrote.

“Today we’re delighted to announce support for five new languages: Amharic, Tigrinya, Hebrew, Oriya and Sinhalese. This bring the total up to 22 languages spoken across Africa, South Asia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East,” he announced.

The tool at google.com/transliterate now supports the new languages as well, but Google is also offering a downloadable tool to use when you don’t have Internet access, the Google Transliteration Input Method Editor (IME). It’s available for multiple Windows versions and it now has 64-bit support as well. The new version also adds support for five more languages, Amharic, Russian, Sanskrit, Serbian and Tigrinya.

Another tool that Google has been testing, but that it hasn’t officially announced yet, adds a virtual keyboard for several localized versions of Google Search. Many international Google sites for languages that don’t use a Roman script now feature the virtual keyboard that enables users to input special characters that may not be available on their hardware keyboard.