I had some questions about the advantages of transliteration. For many people, transliteration is new. It is so easy that people think - How come nobody thought of this before? Once you try it, you will never want to install a keyboard driver again.
Transliteration should be a standard part of Sun Java, Mac, Linux (and Windows) text controls.
And somebody did think of this before - me in 1998. I made a little typing tool to help scholars and it was an instant success. Suddenly, typing foreign languages was easy. I’ve been using it in my applications for years (for instance, I use it in KitQC2).
What stopped me from creating transliteration for the Internet? Two things :
- The Java War. Microsoft was not delivering Java updates with Windows and a lot of people had Java turned off. Although I build an applet for Java, I never promoted it because it would not be available to everybody without any trouble at all.
- At the beginning, Javascript controls did not give access to the cursor position. Without that, transliteration was ‘all or nothing’ instead of character-by-character. Again : too complicated for the average person who, not surprisingly, just wants to get stuff done.
Question 1 : “Unfortunately, I don’t really see how your script is of any practical use - the more characters you allow replacement of, the more legitimate letter combinations become impossible to type”.
- The user can turn transliteration on and off. If they need to type something that uses the transliteration codes then they just turn it off. The transliteration is done on a character by character basis. They can even go back and just add an accent to a character if they forgot it. (try it in the emsjuwel demo).
- character codes to not have to be 2 characters. It can be one character. Or, even a entire phrase like : ‘this is something that becomes a character’ could be used. What does that mean? Here’s a clue : imagine that you need to type Chinese into the Baidu.com search engine. Chinese has thousands of characters. So, you can master all that for typing OR (with transliteration) you could type ‘house building good‘ in English and it would transliterate into the Chinese characters. Or, if you are Chinese, you could type (I don’t speak Chinese!) wu- dao/ wu\ foo- ho/ and get the characters that are used. The code at the end just gives the inflection of the sound (which changes the meaning of words in Chinese). Whether you are Chinese or not, transliteration is an easy and fast way to type Chinese. Wait! ‘house’ is just one character? Isn’t transliteration more work? House is one character out of thousands and it is composed of several brush strokes. I think a Chinese person travelling in the USA would prefer to type wu- into Baidu (for example) since a Chinese IME may not be available on the computer that they are using. If you are English, you can now type house as fast in Chinese as you can type it in English.
- it is easy to let users customize the transliteration codes. For instance, when you just start learning Chinese you would type house. Later you might use wuhouse. Finally, you could simplify it to phonetics and type wu-.
Question 2 : How is transliteration any benefit over the existing method of accessing non-English characters on a regular keyboard?
The advantages over keyboard switching and Alt-0999 typing are numerous in the real world!
- Transliteration is very intuitive. For instance, to type accents on many computers you type the accent *before* the letter. When you write by hand, you put the accent *after* the letter. I used e/ as an example to show how natural this is for typing. This also makes it much easier to remember how to type the accents. What is easier to remember Alt-0233 or e/ ? Can you guess how to make è ? If you guessed e\ then congratulations! How about ô ? It is o^ . It’s really intuitive.
- there are many people who read several languages but don’t type them often. For instance, I regularly read 5 languages but I only write often in 2. For the Internet the problem becomes obvious. If I am on a German web site and I want to search for something I don’t want to switch keyboards to type in a couple of characters. Transliteration would make it easy for me to type in my search terms.
- keyboard layouts are invisible when you switch them. Some accents aren’t used very often. I finally gave up and put the Alt-0999 codes up on the bulletin board behind my computer for that ‘every now and again’ situation where I only need a character or two to enter something on somebody else’s web site.
- typing skills. I type all day. It drives me crazy to switch keyboards. With transliteration, I can touch-type foreign languages without losing my typing skills (especially important for programmers!). On the other hand, many people can’t touch-type. For these people, switching keyboard layouts (making the keys invisible) is useless.
- learning a foreign language. One of the biggest barriers to using computers for learning a language is the keyboard. Making it easy for people who are learning a language to type the foreign characters would make language learning software much more effective. At the beginning, they just need to do the exercises. They won’t be typing long texts.
- dictionary usage for foreign languages - If I just need to look up a couple of words in a text that I am reading, I certainly don’t want to fuss with switching keyboard layouts.
- minority languages - Anyway, many minority languages have no keyboard drivers that are easy to find (or any keyboard driver at all). With transliteration, you can create an easy way to type any minority language.
- For scholars : you can also make it easy to type the characters from different historical periods of a language (if you have a font) so your scholarly document can be written in (for instance) English character sets from different historical periods.
- the techblock - installing keyboards and switching them is not a completely trivial task for many computer users.
- travel - What if you are in Russia and you don’t have access to your computer? What if you are making a presentation with a customer and you want to show them something on their computers? Nobody is going to let you start installing keyboard drivers on their computers.
- travel - what if you are an average Russian schmuck travelling in the USA and you don’t have your computer - so you use an Internet cafe? How is he going to use the keyboard? Lots of places support English but very few Internet Cafes in the States support Russian (or Arabic, Chinese, etc).
There are even more advantages, but this should do for a start.
Well, I hope that this helped you to understand the advantages of transliteration. I only put up a little demo javascript because most web sites would only implement a couple of languages. I would be happy if my little javascript takes some of the stress out of using the Internet in this small world.
If you like transliteration and you want to help out, then contact Sun (Java), Apple and any Linux friends that you have a suggest that transliteration be a part of the basic text components. That way, nobody would need the javascript and everybody would be much more productive.
So, back to the mines…
