Google is offering a brand new feature in their Google Labs called Google Transliteration Feature.
It is an interesting feature and potentially useful to expand your target audience. For instance, the current population in the world is roughly 6,964,912,614 people (and 3 people are born every second, so the above number is already antiquated, but it will have to do!) and out of these almost 7 billion people 330 million speak English as their native language and 150 million people speak it at high proficiency as a second language. That means a total of 480 million people speak English at a very fluent level, which is a lot of people and could keep you busy indefinitely. However, this also means there are 6,484,912,614 people in the world who DON’T speak English at all or only speak it on a low proficiency level (once again, these are approximations, but they illustrate the point). Based off these calculations, a whopping 93% of the entire world’s population does not speak English at a fluent level, if at all. That is a HUGE market and to even tap into a sliver of it could increase your profits, and the Transliteration Feature is one way to help reach out to those who are not completely fluent in English.
Now to explain the difference between Transliteration and Translation, for these two are different. A translation means identifying the corresponding word(s) in one language to their meaningful equivalent in another language, such as “water” in English corresponds to “agua” in Spanish or how the French word “oui” corresponds to the English word “yes”. A transliteration means converting word(s) in one language to word(s) in another language by means of their close approximation in sound; this is usually done when there are no equivalencies in another language. For example, the name “Steve” doesn’t have a workable equivalence in Mandarin Chinese, nor does “Chicago” in Russian or other Slavic languages. In these cases, transliteration would be used to make “Steve” and “Chicago” more intuitive and easier to pronounce in Mandarin Chinese or Russian (or whatever language you are working with). Names, places, brand names, and newer words (twitter, blog, etc.) are usually transliterated. However, any word can be transliterated, with varying success as to whether or not the non-English audience will understand the messages you are trying to convey.
When you go to the Google Transliteration Feature you will see a screen that looks like this:
Google Transliteration Feature
Notice how in the gray bar you are given instructions on how to work Google Transliteration: “Type a word in English and press SPACE to transliterate.”
You are given a list of options as to what language you want to transliterate into. In addition to English, there are 13 languages to choose from: Arabic, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Persian, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu. These are languages focused in the most populated regions in the world – South Asia namely, but also Central Asia and the Middle East. For my examples, I will transliterate into Hindi, since that is the language I am most proficient and thus I can check most easily (although I am less proficient in Gujarati, Punjabi, and Bengali, I can still check to ensure the results are correct).
Select Your Language:
Language Collection in Google Transliteration
Once selected, type in your English word you want transliterated – mine will be “Labrador”. Hit the SPACE button to have it translated into your language of choice.
Transliteration - Hindi and English
As you can see, “Labrador” went from English into Hindi and EVEN into Devanagari Script (which is the script Hindi is written in) – awesome!
I added the English text beneath it to demonstrate that the word is transliterated correctly – if you can’t read Devanagari script / Hindi, it does indeed spell “L-A-B-R-A-D-O-R”. If you wish to add English text and NOT have it transliterated into another language, type the word and then press “Ctrl + G” . It will not transliterate your word. If you want to reactivate the transliteration, press “Ctrl + G” again.
Now lets pretend that a business wants to transliterate their brand name – this would be one of the chief reasons to use this tool. For our example, we will transliterate “Micro Niche Finder” from English into Hindi!
Transliteration Proof
So this still reads and would be pronounced as “Micro Niche Finder”, even though it is literally spelled “Micro Niche PHinder”. The “Ph” sound is the closest sound possible to the “f” sound, so it is used. This is transliteration at its finest! Explore the Google Transliteration feature – you never know when you will have to transliterate your name, business, or brand name into another language!
