Reverse Transliteration

Azhagi has a sophisticated Reverse Transliterator (available in Azhagi since 2003) which can help you convert any Tamil Text back to its exact English phonetic equivalent.

To elaborate, Reverse Transliteration gives the reverse of your existing Tamil texts (which you might have generated earlier in 'Single Screen' interface of Azhagi or typed directly in any external application like MS-Word). For a screen snapshot depicting this feature, visit http://azhagi.com/pics/snaps/azReverseTrans2.jpg.

Reverse transliteration is unique to Azhagi and it has helped some of our users immensely. A few instances are mentioned below:

1. The MD of a company (one of Azhagi's clients) was from the Northern part of India. Though he had learnt to speak Tamil, he was unable to read Tamil. But, he was interested to read all the official correspondences which took place in Tamil and also was very interested in reading Tamil literature (mainly Bharathi's poems) of interest to him. So, he needed all the text in Tamil to be delivered in Transliterated English. What the employees did was to type out the text in MS-Word using Azhagi and generate the transliterated English in reverse and hand it over to their MD.

2. Users of Azhagi who are astrologers and film scriptwriters also find this very effective, for certain needs of them. For instance, a Tamil film dialogue-writer had hundred pages of dialogues written in Tscii Tamil already. But, the actor who was chosen to deliver those dialogues did not know to read Tamil. So, the actor/writer were in a fix until they came to know of this unique feature in Azhagi. Azhagi did all the conversion for them in no time and they were a happy lot.

3. Many of our users have their relatives/friends/grand-children who know to speak Tamil very well but do not know to read Tamil. For them also, reverse transliteration comes in very handy, for the same reasons as cited above. For instance, suppose you have a beautiful poem typed out in Tamil but the friend to whom you wish to email this poem does not know to read Tamil, though he is very interested in your poems. In such cases, you can very well use Reverse Transliterator to get back the English phonetic equivalent and send it across to him/her.

See that the TTA of Azhagi holds the text to be converted. To achieve the same, either open an rtf Tamil document directly in Azhagi or copy/paste your text on to the TTA of Azhagi from an external document.

Click on 'Tools->Power Tools->Reverse Transliteration'. Your converted text will appear in Tanglish in a separate screen. For a screen snapshot depicting this feature, visit http://azhagi.com/pics/snaps/azReverseTrans2.jpg.

1. In the screen holding the reverse transliterated text, you can change the dual syllabled sounds (wherever required) by clicking on 'Search' and then on 'Replace' at the appropriate places. i.e. you can change 'k' to 'g', 'p' to 'b', etc. wherever required.

2. You can change case of the whole text to small case, if you require the same, by clicking on 'Make all lowercase'.

As of now, Reverse Transliteration is possible only for existing Tamil texts which are in Tscii encoding. So, if your Tamil texts are in any other encoding, it has to be converted first to Tscii. Multiple font encoding converters are available on the net. If you are not aware of any, please visit http://azhagi.com/indic.html to get to know them. Please note that as of now, Azhagi can provide Unicode to Tscii conversion.

When you generate your Tamil text using 'Dual Screen' Transliteration, the English text is always visible and available and can be stored in a separate file too. So, Reverse transliteration is not needed.