So what exactly is this Google Transliteration IME and what does it do? IME stands for Input Method Editor; just think of it as ‘the way’ to put those extra characters in your language on any writable area, like the area in which you type your mail, or a search box for example. Lets assume you use an English keyboard, and want to type in Hindi, or in my case Malayalam but, your keyboard only provides for a limited number of characters. In order to overcome that limitation, a lot of Key combination were required to get the exact character you wanted. For example, on my windows machine, Alt + 0225 gives me an acute á as the result. This was an inane process and was never favored by the normal user.
Along comes Google with its language tools, and one of them is Google Transliteration, which lets users type a word the way it sounds, using Latin characters and converting it into the language you have chosen. Google Transliteration has been around for a fairly long time, and has creeped into services like Blogger, Gmail, Knol, Orkut and even as a bookmarklet. A transliteration API is also available for developers to exploit. With the upcoming Chrome OS, the Chrome browser and the need to have a transliteration tool available for any input context, the Transliteration IME makes perfect sense. With this review, you will soon discover how easy this process is.
To begin with: Install the tool (download here), restart your computer and you are all set to go. You will need to do some minimal configuration in your language settings to get the language toolbar up and running.
As soon as you switch languages, the Google Transliteration IME toolbar pops up. The toolbar has options to toggle between the languages you have installed. A button to show an onscreen keyboard that helps you pick characters directly or see what sound (in roman script) can give you the character you are looking for. You have some basic setting like page size – which is the number of options that will be displayed to you as you type, changing fonts, help etc. A small button to minimize the toolbar at the end as well.
I’m doing an online search with the Transliteration IME enabled. I’m going to search for ‘poocha‘ which means ‘cat‘ in Malayalam. The interface provides me with options to search online and suggests possible words to me as well.
I’m doing a search from Open Office Writer, now, which in turn opens my default browser (which is Firefox) and runs a Google Search as well.
Works with mostly everything. Lets tweet and show.
It works well with most of the software you have, like your word processor or gTalk. I did, however, manage to crash it with Skype, Windows Explorer and Firefox as well, but hey, thats me :D
The Google Transliteration IME is only available for Windows 7/Vista/XP 32-bit operating systems as of now, and for 14 different languages – Arabic, Bengali, Farsi (Persian), Greek, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu only.
There are some quirks with the transliteration and hardly any grammar support plus some other minor issues that Google needs to sort out over time, but with an easy enough installation, detailed documentation, easy to use interface and a free price tag the Google Transliteration IME is worth trying! Its at least better than investing in an isolated piece of software for your language needs. Get it here
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