India is the home of a mind boggling 1,652 number of languages. And it’s a shame that the vernacular content in India is still in its very nascent stage, with all content being produced in English. Google India in the past has been spending a lot of effort in promoting the use of vernacular content in the country, the lack of which is clearly hurting the growth of internet user base in India.
They launched their first transliteration application on Google India Labs two years ago, which let users type in Hindi using an english keyboard. And now they have recently launched transliteration bookmarklets for five Indian languages: Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu. Transliteration Bookmarklets is a browser-based java applet that automatically converts the typed text into the supported languages and is browser independent. The main feature of this bookmarklets is that it allows transliteration in almost all the browser form fields so that it can be used on any sites including browser chats like in Gmail etc. It uses the Google transliteration service in the background.
How to use the service?
To use the bookmarklets just drag this next bookmark links to the bookmark bar, Type in Hindi, and click on the bookmark link from the bar whenever you want to use it. It takes few seconds to initialize and then when you type anything in the field it would automatically get translated or user can click tab button to translate after typing.
This product is going to be a big boon for the huge non-English users base and would make it very simple to use Hindi and other languages across the internet. The bookmarklet could be used on any blank form field across any sites.
Limitations?
The only major drawback for this bookmarklet is that one has to enable it on every page as there is no option to enable its blanket use. And maybe all this boomarking and API limitations stuff will deter the amateur internet users. Maybe something more user friendly will help?
How they are going to support for other indian languages ?
@ chetan Google’s main thrust would be only on the main regional lanuguages as its almost impossible to go after all languages and economically unviable… but the above point was to emphasize the importance and diversity of regional languages.
This kind of service is to be designed for people who are not too techie. The way it works currently does not makes much sense to this group of users