Transliteration schemes

First, some history. Back to the early nineties during the early days of internet. When Indians go abroad, they take their music and religion along with them. ITRANS by Avinash Chopde was one of the first transliteration schemes used to render the dEvanAgari script into English. This is a modification of the Harvard-Kyoto system. It was the H-K system that was used to transliterate first the vAlmIki rAmAyaNa into English, not in India but in Japan ITRANS is still being used. In those days many Sanskrit stOtrAs and subhAshitAs as well as the Hindi film songs were rendered using this scheme. By the way, the Sanskrit document list is a great repository of religious material and stOtras on all Indian gods.

Almost at the same time, in the Rice University, a few graduate and undergraduate students devised a scheme to write Telugu in Roman script. This is called Rice Transliteration scheme (RTS) and is still in use. Soon all languages were being written in the Roman script and converted into the Indian script.

Originally, barahA was intended solely for the kannaDa community, but later using the same technology, the present edition can render almost all Indian languages. Moreover, these can be rendered in the Unicode so that portability becomes easy. The wordpad in the present edition can convert scripts from any Indian language to any other one. This is very useful for people to learn languages (e.g. for bRndA ma'am to learn bengAli Actually this is quite useful in another way. One can take, say, the Tamil script and render it into English. Then it is very easy to make searches in English.

There is a new browser called Epic (based on Mozilla Firefox and developed entirely in India and eminently suitable for the Indian audience). This browser has the facility to write in 15 Indian languages. It also has an online word processor as well as virus scan.
If you want to go to an unknown site, it gives the web of trust (WOT) ratings too.

Having lived abroad for thirty years and being murdered daily (I mean the pronunciation of my name), I use the transliteration scheme to familiarise the western audience as how to utter my name.

Regards! - mOhana