Has anyone ever started speaking to you in a foreign language that you couldn’t make heads or tails of? A new tool out of Google Labs may be of help — if you have a good memory for sound and know the originating language.
Google Transliteration is a tool that allows you to type a word in English and have it appear in a target language. The workspace for this new tool is an open space. To start using the tool, go to www.google.com/transliterate.
Define the target language by using the drop-down menu at the top left. Your choices are Amharic, Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Persian, Punjabi, Russian, Sanskrit, Serbian, Sinhalese, Tamil, Telugu, Tigrinya, and Urdu.
For this short article, the Chinese language will be used. From the moment a character is entered, the program offers a range of characters below the text. The typist is putting in “Nin hao?” (asking “How are you?” as a friendly query to a close and dear individual to the speaker).
The simplified ideograms begin appearing below the typed entry, and include a range of choices for “hao”. This suggests a basic requirement to differentiate between the simplified ideograms that follow.
Using this tool apparently requires the ability to sound out consonants and vowels from other languages and to pick through various options offered by the tool.
Those who want to use a Western-style keyboard for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Indic characters may download the Google Transliterate Input Method Editor (IME) at www.google.com/ime/transliteration.
