How do I use the transliteration feature?

The Quick Answer

• Go to the Settings | Language and formatting tab and enable the transliteration option.
• * Select your language.
• Click the Transliteration button on the posting form to type in transliteration mode.

What is transliteration?

Blogger offers an automatic transliteration option for converting Roman characters to the characters used in the following languages:

• Amharic
• Arabic
• Bengali
• Greek
• Persian
• Gujarati
• Kannada
• Hindi
• Malayalam
• Marathi
• Nepali
• Punjabi
• Russian
• Sanskrit
• Serbian
• Tamil
• Telugu
• Tigrinya
• Urdu

This lets you type these languages phonetically in English script and still have t

hem appear in their correct alphabet. Note that this is not the same as translation -- the sound of the words is converted from one alphabet to the other, not the meaning. For example, typing 'hamesha' transliterates into Hindi as:

Enabling the Transliteration Feature

To enable this feature, go to the Settings | Language and formatting page, select Enable for the transliteration option, and select your preferred language. This setting will affect all blogs on your account.

Next, go to your post editor and you'll see a new button.

Typing with Transliteration

This button toggles the transliteration feature on and off. When it's on, it affects the title, labels, and body of your post. The letters of a word will appear in a box with alternative suggestions as you type them until you reach the end of the word. As soon as you type a space or a punctuation mark, the letters will be converted to the new characters, like this:

If you prefer to do the transliteration all at once, rather than as you go, you can type your text with the transliteration button turned off. Then select all your text and click the button. Everything selected will be transliterated at once, and you can go back and edit it as desired. (Note: This only works in the body of the post, not in the title or labels.)

The transliteration will attempt to match the sounds of the letters as accurately as possible between the two alphabets. If you find that it's incorrect, however, you can fix it.