Frequently Asked Questions

What is transliteration?
Transliteration consists in representing the characters of a given script by the characters of another, while keeping the operation reversible. In other words, the transliteration of a transliterated text should return the original text.
Transliteration vs. Translation?
The transliteration process means that a word written in a character set like the Hindi alphabet is transposed in another, say the Assamese syllabics. In other words, there is no translation involved. If the source word means nothing in the given language, its transliterated form will also mean nothing, even though it will look like a word in that language as it will be written in its alphabet or syllabic system.
What is transliteration used for?
  • Transliteration is particularly used by libraries or for the processing of textual data. When a user performs a search or indexes content, the transliteration process can find the information written in a different alphabet and returns it into the user's script.
  • Transliteration is also used to read on line information is a specific language script in another language script without changing or translating the language itself
  • Why Go Button?
    This has two uses
    a) to close the popup
    b) transliterate any content fetched after main page ready
    Facebook and many newspaper sites gradually fetch data. In newspapers twitter feeds are fetched after main page ready. This delayed fetch happens in web email like gmail or yahoo .
    Why are Fonts too big or too small; anything to help?
    Browsers differ widely in their internal implementations and even across platforms ex MAC and Windows You may wish to try FontScale and increment or decrement the size
    Why am I unable to install the extension?
  • Make sure you use the right browser for right extension. For example, Firefox for the Firefox add on.
  • You may have an antivirus configured to block. Try changing setting to allow trusted extensions.
  • Our extension converts South Asian text and can be trusted.
  • If it is an office laptop with many restrictions, then use on personal PC.
  • Universally extensions work only on Desktops. They will not work on smartphones or tablets.
  • We have modest annual subscription paid custom Windows browser which is a DotNet APP that works in 32/64bit and Windows 7 and above.
  • We will soon have smart phones or tablets APPs paid on modest annual subscription licence.
  • Why is Transliteration sometimes slow?
  • Transliteration is in local memory and current browsers are fast so this process is very fast.
  • What is SLOW is the time for all the page content of very heavy pages of news sites to be loaded including hidden text content like scripts.
  • Transliteration can start only AFTER all the text content is loaded.
  • Some newspapers load text typically Breaking News, Disqus Twitter Facebook feeds AFTER main document loaded. Such delayed loaded text are also transliterated automatically.
  • Can images or any font be transliterated?
  • Only Unicode Text of page is processed.
  • Images can't be transliterated. Some poetry sites, e-papers are all images... they can't be transliterated.
  • Some Indian newspapers ido not use Unicode... rather they use very out-dated 8-bit fonts. These too will not be processed.