Gmail Adds Transliteration

One of the biggest complaints from a lot of non-english speakers is that there’s an inherent bias towards English and other languages that use Roman characters in technology. That’s becoming less the case as more and more developers begin considering other written languages. For instant Gmail now supports sending email in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam. Pluggd.in tried it out…

The feature is enabled for Indian users, but if you don’t see the language menu, hop to settings page and enable the ‘transliteration’ checkbox (via). Google’s transliteration is also available for Blogger, Orkut, and iGoogle. I tried out the feature and the implementation doesn’t seem to match what Google did with Blogger – few texts aren’t translated, one needs to wait to see the transliterated version (sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t).