Google Transliteration Goes Global

It's not exactly a secret anymore that Google is pushing hard on translations, constantly updating the tools it built around its machine-translation technology, which is getting more accurate with every iteration. The reason is simple, to make more online content available to more people, which indirectly leads to higher revenue for the company. Now, Google is updating a recent tool that, while not directly related to translations, falls pretty much in the same category, Google Transliteration. The tool enables users to type words using roman characters, and then have them converted to other scripts like Greek or Hindi, and has now launched globally with 17 supported languages.

“Using Google Transliteration you can convert Roman characters to their phonetic equivalent in your language. Note that this is not the same as translation — it's the sound of the words that are converted from one alphabet to the other... Today we are pleased to introduce a new and improved version of Google Transliteration, available in Google Labs,” Nilesh Tathawadekar and Mohammed Aslam, software engineers at Google's Bangalore office wrote.

Google launched the tool in Labs with support for just one Indian language. Since then, the team has been hard at work both in the functionality and features, but also adding new languages. Now, Google Transliteration supports 17 languages allowing users to write in Hindi, Russian, Greek, Nepali, and so on.

The text editor itself is a lot more powerful and feature-rich with all the basic tools you'd expect from an online rich-text editor these days. The tool also features an integrated dictionary, based on Google's existing technology, to double check a word, though it's not available for all the supported languages at this point. Finally, there is a unicode character picker to allow users to manually construct a word. The tool has been integrated with several Google products, like Blogger and Gmail, and is also available as a bookmarklet and now even as a stand-alone Windows tool.