ITRANS
The "Indian languages TRANSliteration" (ITRANS) is an ASCII transliteration scheme for Indic scripts, particularly for Devanagari script.
The need for a simple encoding scheme that used only keys available on an ordinary keyboard was felt in the early days of the RMIM newsgroup where lyrics and trivia about Indian popular movie songs was being discussed. In parallel was a Sanskrit Mailing list that quickly felt the need of an exact and unambiguous encoding. ITRANS emerged on the RMIM newsgroup as early as 1994.[1] This was spearheaded by Avinash Chopde,who developed a transliteration package. Its latest version is v5.34. The package also enables automatic conversion of the Roman script to the Indic version.
ITRANS was in use for the encoding of Indian etexts - it is wider in scope than the Harvard-Kyoto scheme for Devanagari transliteration, with which it coincides largely, but not entirely. The early Sanskrit mailing list of the early 1990s, almost same time as RMIM, developed into the full blown Sanskrit Documents project and now uses ITRANS extensively, with thousands of encoded texts. With the wider implementation of Unicode, the traditional IAST is used increasingly also for electronic texts.
Like the Harvard-Kyoto scheme, the ITRANS romanization does not use any diacritical sign not found on the common English-language computer keyboard, and it is quite easy to read and pick up.
Transliteration scheme[2]
| Devanāgarī | ITRANS |
|---|---|
| अ | a |
| आ | aa |
| इ | i |
| ई | I/ii |
| उ | u |
| ऊ | U/uu |
| ए | e |
| ऐ | ai |
| ओ | o |
| औ | au |
| ऋ | RRi/R^i |
| ॠ | RRI/R^I |
| ऌ | LLi/L^i |
| ॡ | LLI/L^I |
| अं(added as anusvāra) | .m/N/.m |
| अः | H |
| अँ | .N |
| ्(virāma/halant) | .h |
| ऽ(avagraha:elision during sandhi) | .a |
| Om symbol | OM,AUM |
The Devanāgarī consonant letters include an implicit 'a' sound. In all of the transliteration systems, that 'a' sound must be represented explicitly.
| Devanāgarī | ITRANS |
|---|---|
| क | ka |
| ख | kha |
| ग | ga |
| घ | gha |
| ङ | ~Na |
| च | cha |
| छ | Cha |
| ज | ja |
| झ | jha |
| ञ | ~na |
| ट | Ta |
| ठ | Tha |
| ड | Da |
| ढ | Dha |
| ण | Na |
| त | ta |
| थ | tha |
| द | da |
| ध | dha |
| न | na |
| प | pa |
| फ | pha |
| ब | ba |
| भ | bha |
| म | ma |
| य | ya |
| र | ra |
| ल | la |
| व | va/wa |
| श | sha |
| ष | Sha |
| स | sa |
| ह | ha |
| Devanāgarī | ITRANS |
|---|---|
| क्ष | kSa/kSha/xa |
| त्र | tra |
| ज्ञ | GYa/j~na |
| श्र | shra |
| Devanāgarī | ITRANS |
|---|---|
| क़ | qa |
| ख़ | Kha |
| ग़ | Ga |
| ज़ | za |
| फ़ | fa |
| ड़ | .Da/Ra |
| ढ़ | .Dha/Rha |
See also
External links
- Indic transliteration on computers - brief history
- ITRANS Official site
- HiTrans - Online ITRANS to Unicode converter with scheme extensions
- Online Interface to ITRANS - ITRANS to Unicode UTF8
- View Unicode Hindi through Roman transliteration (ITRNS scheme)
- Downloadable ITRANS to Unicode transformer A simple Java applet demo, with source code. Uses a simple table based extendable algorithm.
- Xlit: Transliteration system for Indian Languages Online and Integrable solution by CDAC Mumbai
- Google Transliteration (supports Indic Languages) Online Transliteration by Google
- Itranslator 2003 as a freeware from Onkarananda Ashram Himalayas
- Lipika IME available for Mac OS X
- Indian Language Transliteration for all users and programmers - Transliterates Bengali, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil and Telugu.
References
- ↑ "An early post from 1995 referring to ITRANS effort going on RMIM newsgroup". Retrieved 15 December 2015.
- ↑ "ITRANS (version 5.34)". www.aczoom.com. Retrieved 2015-12-15.