Developing a Transliteration System for Telugu Script Abstract

Transliteration is a method of representing the text of one writing system in another writing system. It attempts to replicate the text written in the source script in a different script. In reversible transliteration, the source spelling is preserved in the target script, and enables to recreate the original without any loss of information. All modern Indic scripts are ultimately derived from Brahmi, the script of the Asokan inscriptions. Brahmi was used all over the Indian sub continent to write the regional languages. During that period, all Indian languages were written employing this single script. However, as centuries passed regional variations were developed and each variant of the Brahmi evolved even more giving birth to the modern Indic scripts. The regional scripts have since become completely different and unintelligible to the speakers of other languages. To read in another Indian language, a person is required to learn the writing system of the language along with the language itself. Telugu Script is one of the offshoot of the Brahmi Script though mainly used to write the Telugu Language, is also employed to write tribal languages like Gondi. There is a high necessity to build a Transliteration system that performs a reversible transliteration between Telugu & other Indian languages. A comprehensive transliteration system that will enable transliteration of other Indian Scripts to Telugu, and from Telugu to other Indian script is discussed in detail. The attempted transliteration system for Telugu script will be enabled to support all the nuisances of Indic Languages such as, Malayalam cillkars, Sinhala saaka consonants, Tamil-Malayalam Alveolar Nasal & Retroflex Approximant, Perso-Arabic Consonants of the North Indic scripts - among others. These characters must be enabled to be represented in the Telugu Transliteration. The emergence of Unicode enables the usage of various diacritics to denote these sounds in Telugu Script for the purpose of Transliteration. Also various conventions of the Telugu script such as the usage of Anusvra for nasalization etc may need to be applied during the transliteration process, to improve the readability of the Transliterated text. By the implementation of such a Transliteration system for Telugu, any language can be seamlessly expressed in the Telugu Script without loss of any linguistic information. This will enable people to read other Indian Languages in their own native script. The Transliteration system will also be able to handle the transliteration of Telugu script itself to other Indic writing systems reversibly. The paper will discuss all the above mentioned points in detail with a model implementation of such a Transliteration system.