Google Indic Transliteration is yet another innovative service from Google. It allows users to type in English and transliterate(note that this is not same as not translation) the text to any of the supported Indian languages – Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam.
For instance, If you type “Amitabachan blog”, Google Indic Transliteration for Hindi can automatically convert it to “???????? ?????”(See the animation below if you don't have Hindi fonts installed)
That is very cool isn't it? This is extremely useful when I want to quickly draft an email to my dad who understands only Telugu.
The uses of this services are unlimited and It depends on how creative you. Google Indic Transliteration Javascript APIs are available freely for using in your web sites and blogs. You can build your own web applications, Firefox plugins and other mashups using the APIs.
It seems to be there is no API support for using Google Transliteration on desktop and server programming languages like C#.NET, VB.NET, ASP.NET, PHP, Perl/CGI, etc. I searched through documentation and could not find any reference material for the application API support.
Hidden URL That Support
dog food diet
s Transliteration
By investigating the news groups and discussion forums I found an URL that can be used in application to retrieve transliterated data for a given text in JSON output format.
For example the following URL transliterates the words amitabachan & blog and return a JSON output object which can be consumed in programming languages like C#.NET, VB.NET, ASP.NET, PHP, Perl/CGI, etc
http://www.google.com/transliterate/indic?tlqt=1&langpair=en|hi&text=amitabachan,blog&&tl_app=1
JSON Output
[ { “ew” : “amitabachan”, “hws” : [ “????????”,”?????????”,”???????”,”????????”,”????????”, ] }, { “ew” : “blog”, “hws” : [ “?????”,”?????”,”????”,”??????”,”??????”, ] }, ]
(You should have Hindi fonts installed to view the above JSON output properly)
Legal issues!!
This secret URL looks very useful as we can call it through a HTTP JSON API of our preferred language and process the results. But it is not clear whether we are allowed to access the URL from desktop and server side programming languages. So if you are planning to build any application using this service, first make sure that you will not be penalized by Google.
I would really appreciate if any of you can provide the Terms and Conditions of using this API in desktop & server side programming languages.