The "Indian languages TRANSliteration" (ITRANS) is an

ASCII ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because ...

transliteration Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one script to another that involves swapping letters (thus ''trans-'' + '' liter-'') in predictable ways, such as Greek → , Cyrillic → , Greek → the digraph , Armenian → or L ...

scheme for

Indic scripts The Brahmic scripts, also known as Indic scripts, are a family of abugida writing systems. They are used throughout the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia and parts of East Asia. They are descended from the Brahmi script of ancient India ...

, particularly for the

Devanagari Devanagari ( ; , , Sanskrit pronunciation: ), also called Nagari (),Kathleen Kuiper (2010), The Culture of India, New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, , page 83 is a left-to-right abugida (a type of segmental writing system), based on the ...

script. The need for a simple encoding scheme that used only keys available on an ordinary keyboard was felt in the early days of th
RMIM
newsgroup where lyrics and trivia about Indian popular movie songs were 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. This was spearheaded by Avinash Chopde, who developed a transliterationAksharamukha transliteration tool
Akshara Mukha is an Asian script (two way) converter freeware. It converts between 20 different South Asian & East Asian scripts. It also supports 5 major Latin transliteration conventions such as IAST, ISO, Harvard Kyoto, ITRANS & Velthuis. You can access the project fro
here
While using the tool, 'source' can be set to for example: ITRANS or Harvard-Kyoto, and 'target' can be set to a particular script like Devanagari-Hindi.(When you are using a north Indian script, tick the box: Remove ‘a’.) It can work in reverse too, for example from Hindi to Latin by ISO transliteration. package. Its latest version is v5.34. The package also enables automatic conversionGoogle Transliteration (supports Indic languages)
Online and downloadable tool for transliteration by Google. (Also additionally uses ITRANS bu

of the Roman script to the Indic version. ITRANS was in use for the encoding of Indian

etext e-text (from "''electronic text''"; sometimes written as etext) is a general term for any document that is read in digital form, and especially a document that is mainly text. For example, a computer-based book of art with minimal text, or a se ...

s - it is wider in scope than the Harvard-Kyoto scheme for

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 blow
Sanskrit Documents
project and now uses ITRANS extensively, with thousands of encoded texts. With the wider implementation of

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...

, the traditional

IAST The International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST) is a transliteration scheme that allows the lossless romanisation of Indic scripts as employed by Sanskrit and related Indic languages. It is based on a scheme that emerged during ...

is used increasingly also for electronic texts. Like the Harvard-Kyoto scheme, the ITRANS

romanization Romanization or romanisation, in linguistics, is the conversion of text from a different writing system to the Roman (Latin) script, or a system for doing so. Methods of romanization include transliteration, for representing written text, a ...

only uses diacritical signs found on the common English-language computer keyboard, and it is quite easy to read and pick up.

ITRANS transliteration scheme

ITRANS transliteration schemeOnline Interface to ITRANS
(Online converter tool from Latin script using ITRANS to various Indic scripts. Reliable source at
converter tool page
gives th
mapping spreadsheet
(has clear tilde sign)
Scheme for Devanagari
an

Ultimately the conversion tool follows the mapping spreadsheet. Source code a
GitHub itrans
/ref> is given in the tables below. The ITRANS method is without using diacritics, as compared to other transliteration methods. While using ITRANS, for proper nouns, first letter capitalization is not possible since, ITRANS uses both capital and small letters in its lettering scheme.

Vowels

Consonants

The Devanāgarī consonant letters include an implicit 'a' sound. In all of the transliteration systems, that 'a' sound must be represented explicitly.

Standard Indic consonants

Irregular consonant clusters

Prenasalized consonants

Consonants with Nuqta

Dravidian consonants

Examples

* – * – * – * – * – * – * –

Limitations

Since ITRANS was primarily designed for

Sanskrit Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had Trans-cultural diffusion ...

(and other modern

Indo-Aryan languages The Indo-Aryan languages (or sometimes Indic languages) are a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages in the Indo-European language family. As of the early 21st century, they have more than 800 million speakers, primarily concentrated in India, P ...

), it lacks full-coverage for Indic scripts of other languages. Specifically, the support for Dravidian short-vowels 'e' and 'o' is considered ambiguous (since Indo-Aryan phonology does not differentiate them from long-vowels 'E' and 'O'). Also, the

schwa In linguistics, specifically phonetics and phonology, schwa (, rarely or ; sometimes spelled shwa) is a vowel sound denoted by the IPA symbol , placed in the central position of the vowel chart. In English and some other languages, it rep ...

used in languages like Bengali ( � and Assamese ( � differs from that of other languages ( �, causing a dissonant feeling when typing those languages. Moreover, although both Bengali and Assamese use Eastern Nagari, the phonology of Assamese varies from that of Bengali to a significant extent, causing more friction while typing Assamese. The support for many phones of other languages like Dravidian, Hindustani nuqtas, Sinhala etc. is considered patchy and not consistent across implementations due to lack of standardization. Also, almost no ITRANS implementation fully supports languages like

Kashmiri Kashmiri may refer to: * People or things related to the Kashmir Valley or the broader region of Kashmir * Kashmiris, an ethnic group native to the Kashmir Valley * Kashmiri language, their language People with the name * Kashmiri Saikia Baruah ...

Sindhi Sindhi may refer to: *something from, or related to Sindh, a province of Pakistan * Sindhi people, an ethnic group from the Sindh region * Sindhi language, the Indo-Aryan language spoken by them People with the name * Sarkash Sindhi (1940–2012 ...

, etc.

New version

The ambiguity around Dravidian short-vowels 'e' and 'o' support has been addressed with a new ISO15919 compliant coding scheme, which is uniform across all supported languages/scripts, including nukta. The old version ITRANS 5.3 is maintained for backward compatibility. The changed ones are listed below: The newly launched revamped package supports both the old ITRANS V-5.3 scheme as well as the ISO15919 scheme. In addition, the new package can be customized for any specific INPUT codes. https://www.aczoom.com/itrans/online/

Notes

References

External links

{{External links, date=October 2021, section
ITRANS Official site

ITRANS Unicode Tables (PDF)

* ttp://www.aczoom.com/itrans/online/ Online Interface to ITRANS- ITRANS to Unicode UTF8(Converter tool from Latin script using ITRANS to various Indic scripts)
View Unicode Hindi through Roman transliteration (ITRNS scheme)

Google Transliteration (supports Indic Languages)
Online and downloadable tool for transliteration by Google. (Also additionally uses ITRANS bu

* ttps://github.com/ratreya/Lipika_IME Lipika IME available for Mac OS X Indic computing Hindustani orthography Romanization of Brahmic Sanskrit transliteration