The Insider

I have seen come cool releases from Google that are based on translation and transliteration and have started doing a bit of research on differences between both of them.

I am pretty sure people are well aware of the Yahoo!’s good old Babelfish that translates the given block of text into a particular language. It also translates an entire webpage into the specified language. Google has also launched something similar to it called Google Translate which has the same functionality like Babelfish.

But somehow, a little bit different concept has been applied to Google Indic Transliteration. Now as the name suggests this is only available for Indic languages - Indian and Iranian languages. But the concept that has been used here is called transliteration which means it transliterates word by word.

I know that would sound a bit confusing but imagine typing a block to text english and then translate it to a particular language is Translation.

Whereas, transliteration is a mapping from one system of writing into another, word by word. So basically you would be using an english keyboard and typing words of your own language. So it works in the same concept of phonetic keyboard. Now I think that it is pretty cool.

Google has also integrated this in Blogspot and hence people can turn this option on and write blogs in any of the transindic languages. I hope they would release it soon for other languages as well.

Though this is of not much use in the english speaking countries, it could prove to be a powerful tool in other countries and lift up the usage of Google applications like mail, google docs, blogspot etc enormously.

Now if this blog does not make any sense to you then have a go at Google Indic Transliteration and Yahoo! Babel Fish and you will notice the difference.