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 lang… (read more)