Telugu Script

Writing in Telugu Script

Internet has made writing in Telugu very easy. There is lots of development in Software technology that makes writing in telugu script as easy as typing in English (literally)

First you have understand a bit about ITRANS (Inverse Transliteration Scheme). Transliteration is process of converting letters of one language to their phonetic equivalent representation in another .

Using ITRANS, you will type Telugu phonetically using English letters. For example to get ఏమండి బాగున్నారా? you will type it as EmanDi baagunnArA?

You will notice that there are upper case letters and lower case letters above. To get ధీర్గాలు and వత్తులు or to differentiate between డ and ద or ట and త you need to use these upper case and lower case english letters. Don’t worry after some time you will be very comfortable.

There are many software applications available freely on the internet that will help you to get going. Some of them are :

BARAHA : www.baraha.com
TeluguLipi : http://www.sirigina.com/telugulipi/
Rangavalli : http://www.bhaavana.net/Rangavalli/

These are good applications. But with the advent of UNICODE, these applications have become a bit outdated.

UNICODE is an encoding standard for characters, that gives a unique number to every single character in every single language. It is consistent across all platforms and operating systems. It means if you write something in Unicode and email it to a friend using Linux, he/she will be able to read that message in Windows or Mac, without having to install any special software. This is because most modern operating systems and software libraries have inbuilt support for Unicode.

Many of the above applications lets you convert the script into UNICODE.

However one very popular internet browser based application makes typing in Telugu UNICODE very easy.

WWW.LEKHINI.ORG . Here you can type in English using transliteration scheme and you will see Telugu at the bottom. Since this is in Unicode, you can copy the telugu portion and save it in a Word Document or Adobe Document etc. Visit their website to get more tutorials.

Google has a very good browser based application to do the same thing. Visit the link
http://www.google.com/transliterate/indic/Telugu

Here like Lekhini, you will type in English letters and as you press SPACE key to type next word, the typed word is converted to Telugu. Now, Google does not follow Transliteration scheme strictly. They follow more of a heuristic based conversion. For example to get ఏమండి బాగున్నారా?, you will type “emandi bagunara?”.
You see that you don’t to worry about upper case or lower case etc. It knows the proper word and will convert. Some times, there may be more than few words for what you types. In that case Google provides some choices and you can pick from one of the choices. Though it is much more convenient than using Transliteration, some times, it is a bit cumbersome to get the correct letter that you are looking for. Transliteration that you use in Lekhini etc will always provide the correct transliteration.

Google has upped the ante by providing the same tool in their e-mail application. So if you have Gmail address, then as you type your e-mail you can type telugu and english freely.

Go to your GMAIL, then click on settings at the right corner on the top, and click on “More language options” and then select “Enable Transliteration – type using phonetic English” and in “Default transliteration language:” select Telugu in the drop down.

After that you can toggle between english and telugu using CONTROL+G (two keys pressed together).

What you type is defaulted in Gautami font. There are many telugu fonts available on the internet for displaying this unicode.

Hope this brief write up is useful to you.

Yours faithfully
TCA Literary team