Publication

Abstract : Transliteration is the process to transcribe a script of one language into another, while, backward or back transliteration is converting back the transliterated text into its original script. The highly technical phonetic system of Sanskrit seems to have made the preparation of transliteration scheme quite arduous. This study is focused on development of a rule-based, grapheme model character alignment back-transliteration algorithm of Sanskrit script, transcribed ASCII(American Standard Code for Information Interchange)-encoded English to Devanagari, pursuant to the Harvard-Kyoto (HK) convention. Accordingly , the paper presents the context of the utility for such an algorithm. It also describes the various standard schemes available for transcribing Devanagari into Roman. A survey on the evolution of scripts in India suggests the Brahmi script as the foundation for the origin of variants like Devanagari. Since the nineteenth century, various transliteration schemes based on Roman script have evolved. The International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST) schemes used diacritics to disambiguate phonetic similarities and seem to have induced much strenuous venture for the non-professionals. The ASCII-based, HK and its variant, Indian Language Transliteration (ITRANS) schemes do not use diacritics and hence accounted to be the simplest. Our rationale for the use of HK scheme, stem from its prime traits of Sanskrit Unicode encoding. We have also explained the Sanskrit alphabet and its classifications, which are incorporated into our proffered process. We appraise the complexity of our pseudo-coded algorithm and finally, we propose an extension of this work in the creation of similar tools, for other Indian languages that use the Devanagari script, such as Hindi and Marathi.