Phonetic-Based Forward Online Transliteration Tool from English to Tamil Language

Abstract

Transliteration is the process of mapping the character of one language to the character of some other language based on its phonetics. India is very much diverse in languages where people speak different languages. Though they speak different languages, it might be difficult for them to read the script of those many languages. In a situation like this, transliteration process plays a major role. It helps in various Natural Language Processing applications such as Information retrieval, Machine translation, Speech recognition. These are NLP applications which make the computer understand the natural language as to how human being interprets. It helps in translating technical terms and proper names from one language to another language. Moreover, transliteration works have been carried out in languages such as Japanese, Chinese and English. But when considering Indian languages, especially Tamil language, very few recognizable works have been carried out. In this paper, transliteration process is carried out on Unicode Tamil characters. The phonetics-based forward list processing is implemented for transliterating from English language to Tamil language which yields promising results.