Jalaj

I have been using transliteration for over 10 years and it’s the only way I can type in Hindi language, for I hate learning another keyboard layout. Now that Google recently added transliteration facility to blogger, Let’s see where does Google’s implementation stand in comparison to others.

My first experience with transliteration was with C-DAC’s Leap Lite. Then got to use the online transliteration at rediffmail.com. ITRANS received a overwhelming support from the vast community that powers the sanskritdocuments.org, earlier Sanskrit.gde.to. The above site, to my knowledge, holds the honor of having largest collection of text encoded in a single encoding scheme ITRANS. Other softwares as Baraha and Takhti hold their own share of devoted users. Now Google has entered the scene with initial implementation on Blogger.

All these transliteration services/softwares have been using the Basic transliteration schemes (to name it) where each devnagari (or other language script) character is represented by a Roman character (or a series of characters). Among all transliteration schemes I find C-DAC the best of all as it’s the outcome of a thorough research on the Indian languages and existing texts in different languages.

Let’s dig into the Google’s implementation on blogger. It goes into two layers of transliteration and one layer of manual editing.

The foremost layer is the advanced transliteration which works on the main editor screen where each word you type makes an AJAX call. The text you type here is searched in the database for matching words and up to five matches are sent as response. While the first match is used to replace the word you typed, the others are available when you click on the transliterated word from which you can select if the result obtained differs from that intended. If the text you intended to type is available in none of the matches, you can click on the “Edit…” option which will take you to the “Edit Mode”, which is the next layer of transliteration. The text in the advanced transliteration is treated case-insensitive, and since the matches come from dictionary, you are prevented from any error arising as with case-sensitive transliteration softwares. However the problem here is that you don’t always get intended results as shown in image below, where the intended text appeared in first option and not as default text.

The “Edit Mode” brings to you the Basic Transliteration as also available with other softwares mentioned above. Google has defined it’s own set of encoding scheme available at http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=58228 for use in “Edit Mode”. The Case-sensitive strings are transliterated as per the supported encoding scheme. The “Edit Mode” also guides with possible keystrokes, however these guides also may not be always helpful as with the text from Hanuman Chalisa as shown in image below. Whenever you feel helpless in this mode you can switch to the third layer, which is the manual editing or “On screen keyboard”, which can be started by clicking the keyboard icon by the side.

The “On screen keyboard” allows you to click on each character to type it and also guides for what should the keystroke would have been if you did the editing in “Edit Mode”.

The disadvantage with the last two layers is that they work in word mode and disappears as soon as you finish with a word, so for most of your work you have no choice other than the “Advanced Transliteration”, which has it’s own disadvantage. If you have a dialup connection for internet and choose to close the connection while you type, transliteration will stop for words other than those already transliterated, showing you error as below. And what could be worse that the other two modes also don’t show up (though responsible code still exist offline) for new words.

Now for how good the bi-lingual interface works. If you are going for a complete Hindi or complete English page then everything’s fine and you can just enable or disable respectively the transliteration and go on. But if your go for a hybrid document as I did for Khushwant Singhs poem “Hindi bolna hamari duti hai”, you will have a tough time as the interface doesn’t keep track of which words were type in Hindi/English. You try to add a Hindi text besides an English one and you are prone to transliterate the English word too…

The interface allows you to paste bulk text, and transliterate all of them (max 300 words) by selecting the text and then pressing the Transliteration button. This facility though works, required me pasting 3-4 times and subsequent icon press to achieve this. This doesn’t seem to be a browser problem as I have had same experience on two different locations and OSs.

So that was all about what Google has in store for you with the transliteration facility, and below are my suggestions for what could have made a better user experience.

1. There may be an additional icon for turning off the Advanced Transliteration, which can be helpful for those who are comfortable with Basic Transliteration and find Advanced Transliteration irritating when too many wrong matches show up. This will also be helpful when user chooses to close the net connection and restart when the content is ready for posting.

2. At least the “On screen keyboard” mode may be made to allow multiple words to be keyed in without causing the on-screen keyboard to disappear at the end of word.

3. The Bulk transliteration facility may be made to function without explicitly pressing transliteration key for it, if the editor is already in Transliteration mode.

4. The interface may be made to remember words that were keyed in while out of transliteration mode to prevent their accidental transliteration.

Futher, a similar interface on Gmail will be boon for the users outside the Blogger’s Park…

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