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Monday, May 18, 2009

Google Transliteration Now Supports Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi & Nepali

India is one of the most linguistically diverse countries in the world, with several hundred languages and dialects in active use. The 2001 Indian census estimates that there are 29 languages with more than one million native speakers each. Unfortunately, this wonderful variety is not reflected in the online world. While the amount of content available online in Indian languages is growing, it is still relatively small; most online content is still in English.

To make it easier to create content in local languages, google launched a transliteration service that allows users to type words phonetically using an English keyboard. Google today announced that transliteration service is available in four additional languages: Bengali, Gujarati,Marathi and Nepali (it was already available in Hindi,Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam).

You can try this service at transliteration labs page and in the transliteration iGoogle gadget. Type "aami" to get আমি, "aapane" to get આપણે, "aahe" to get आहे or "chan" to get छन् in Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi and Nepali respectively.

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