Google Malayalam Input 1.0

Google Malayalam Input is a language transliteration tool that makes it a snap for Malayalam language users (i.e. those who are native to the state of Kerala in India) to search/use the Internet in Malayalam.

Transliteration works on the principle that a sound can be reproduced using strings of alphabets of any language, though the reproduced version may not exactly match the original sound(s). Human speech in any language is a sequence of sounds. Hence, a secondary language (English) can be used to imitate the speech in a source language (Malayalam) by forming suitable 'words' in the second one (English), that when spoken, produce nearly the same sound. The sentence 'I like you', in Malayalam will sound as 'Enn-i-ku/nin-g-ale/ishta-ma-nnu' (Note: In this example, slash ('/') characters have been used to divide words).

When entered into Google Malayalam Input, words are transliterated one at a time. How the software responds when this text is entered into Google is shown on Screenshot 1 ('Example-Data capture'). Then the example of entry of the search string followed by an actual search is shown. Mohanlal is a well-known Malayalam movie actor of the present time, and we attempt to find 'Movies in which Mohanlal has acted' (Malayalam='Mohanlal/abhi-naya-cha/chala-chithrangal'), which is shown on Screenshot 2 ('Example-Entry of search string').

Transliteration does not apply to the English-Malayalam language pair only. Google IME (Input Method Editor) enables transliteration between 19 different languages at present - Amharic, Arabic, Bengali, Farsi (Persian), Greek, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Punjabi, Russian, Sanskrit, Serbian, Tamil, Telugu, Tigrinya and Urdu.