A simple approach for building transliteration editors for Indian languages

Abstract

Transliteration editors are essential for keying-in Indian language scripts into the computer using QWERTY keyboard. Applications of transliteration editors in the context of Universal Digital Library (UDL) include entry of meta-data and dictionaries for Indian languages. In this paper we propose a simple approach for building transliteration editors for Indian languages using Unicode and by taking advantage of its rendering engine. We demonstrate the usefulness of the Unicode based approach to build transliteration editors for Indian languages, and report its advantages needing little maintenance and few entries in the mapping table, and ease of adding new features such as adding letters, to the transliteration scheme. We demonstrate the transliteration editor for 9 Indian languages and also explain how this approach can be adapted for Arabic scripts.