Is Transliteration possible with Translate API.

[Raj.Selvakumar Kotts]

Hi 

I know that there is a Google Transliteration API, which is deprecated. We cannot use that since it is deprecated.

We have a paid subscription to Google Translate API. Just wanted to confirm if there is any way to get transliteration instead of translation.  For example Microsoft Translation API seems to have a flag for this.

Is there a way to tell google translate API that

1.  we are only sending names(nouns) , so expected result is transliteration

2. To translate full sentence and not each word, which could provide the expected result.

If Transliteration service is still available via paid route that is also okay. but it should be available in future as well.

Regard

Raj S J

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[Eduardo Ortiz Caraveo]

You can remain using the Transliteration API  even if it was deprecated as mentioned here, no support or new features will be available but you can still use it.

[Raj.Selvakumar Kotts]

Hi,

Thanks for taking the time to answer. But we need to use this in a commercial product. We cannot use a deprecated product as it can go offline anytime, leaving us hanging.

Since we use translation api on mainly names, we are able to get transliteration like results from Translate API itself. But not always.

I think Google does word by word translation.  So that is why I asked the below questions as well..

Is there a way to tell google translate API that

1.  we are only sending names(nouns) , so expected result is transliteration. ie Like sending uppercase letters or in single or double quotes etc.

2. it needs to translate a full sentence and not each word, which could provide the expected result.

Regards

Raj S J

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[Adam Bittlingmayer]

Could you share with us concretely what you want to transliterate?  What languages and content types?

Maybe give an example of each.

Microsoft has a transliteration API, but it doesn't support all languages.

There are actually open-source projects now, like deepchar (deepchar.github.io).  You could talk to them about just getting you a model that would be yours.

[Raj.Selvakumar Kotts]

Hi Adam,

Thanks for the answering. I will look into deepchar and see if we can use that.

As for concrete use case.

Our user will input names of people. It can come in any language. (we can limit this based on any API supported language list, but we would like to support as much as possible). Currently we use Google Translate API to do this. So the all the languages support by the API , we allow as input.

At present we are only looking to transliterate data from any  source language to target language as English only.

We would then use the english data for internal processing.

Since transliteration was deprecated, we used Translate api and it seems to provide us good result in like 60% of the cases. 

ie since we use name(ie nouns), Google Translation is very near to Transliteration result.

But if we could Transliterate which is what we wanted to in first place, then we could provide more reliable results.

As you said, Microsoft supported only few languages for transliteration, and that is why we did not use that in begining. 

To sum it up, we are looking for a transliteration API, which has similar language support as Google Translation API and as easy to integrate

with our application. 

We are okay if the same is paid. 

Thank you. 

[Yingjie He]

Hi all,

Thanks for interesting the Transliteration feature in our API. For more info about the feature, you can contact the sales and support team, they can provide you more detail about the status.

Thanks very much!

[Adam Bittlingmayer]

Hi Raj, thanks for explaining more

The good news is that going from other languages to the Latin alphabet is generally the easier direction.

Re trying to (ab)use Google Translate to do this:

I'm assuming that the main problem you're facing is that sometimes names have meanings and get translated literally.

My instinct would be to prepend something like "Name: " (in the source language) and then remove it from the resulting translation.

It assumes that you know the source language, and it still won't be perfect.  It's not clear if you want something like "Александр" to be transliterated to "Alexander" or "Aleksandr", and neither human nor machine translation is very consistent on this.

Re getting your own solution, the main contributor to deepchar, Nerses, has experience with exactly this use case (person names and company names), in the financial sector.  You could talk to him.