ITRANS

The "Indian languages TRANSliteration" (ITRANS) is an ASCII transliteration scheme for Indic scripts, particularly, but not exclusively, for Devanagari (used for the Hindi, Marathi, Sanskrit, Nepali, Sindhi and other languages). It was developed by Avinash Chopde. The latest version of ITRANS is version 5.30 released in July, 2001. ITRANS has been stabilized at this version.

ITRANS was in some use for the encoding of Indian etexts - it is wider in scope than the Harvard-Kyoto scheme for Devanagari transliteration, with which it coincides largely, but not entirely. With the wider implementation of Unicode, the traditional IAST is used increasingly also for electronic texts.

Like the Harvard-Kyoto scheme, the ITRANS romanization does not use any diacritical sign not found on the common English-language computer keyboard, and it is quite easy to read and pick up.

The ITRANS computer package also enables automatic conversion of the Roman script to the Indic. It was used to compile the Hindi Song Book on the internet. This became an invaluable source for the words of film and other popular lyrics of Hindi and some related languages. It also helped popularize the ITRANS romanization scheme for storing and sharing material in the Indic languages, particularly Hindi and Sanskrit, in the electronic media where the English-keyboard Roman script is a very convenient input medium.

ITRANS forms the basis of a very handy Hindi word-processor by Devendra Parakh.

There is also the ITRANSlator for Windows http://www.omkarananda-ashram.org/Sanskrit/Itranslt.html

ITRANS itself includes an online interface that is quite useful for quick document creation.

There is a large number of Hindi film songs in ITRANS format http://www.giitaayan.com/

Sanskrit documents are the second, probably, in terms of the number of internet documents using ITRANS http://sanskritdocuments.org/

Some details of the ITRANS romanization scheme follow. For some letters, there are variants: e.g. long vowels can be transcribed either by doubling the simple vowel, or with capitals.

Transliteration scheme
Vowels (dependent and independent): a    aa / A       i      ii / I       u     uu / U  RRi / R^i    RRI / R^I    LLi / L^i    LLI / L^I e    ai     o     au     aM    aH

Consonants: (these are used to just represent the consonant part. Devanagari letters also include an implicit 'a' sound. If that is desired, it must be included explicitly.)

k    kh     g     gh     ~N / N^ ch    Ch     j     jh     ~n / JN T     Th     D     Dh     N t     th     d     dh     n p     ph     b     bh     m y     r      l     v / w sh    Sh     s     h      L / ld x / kSh     GY / j~n / dny     shr R (for marathi half-RA) L / ld (marathi LLA) Y (bengali)

Consonants with a nukta (dot) under them (mainly for Urdu Devanāgarī): k with a dot:      q kh with a dot:      K g  with a dot:      G j  with a dot:      z / J ph with a dot:      f D  with a dot:      .D Dh with a dot:      .Dh

Specials/Accents: Anusvara:          .n / M / .m   Avagraha (elision): .a     Ardhachandra:       .c    Chandra-Bindu:      .N    Halant:             .h    Visarga:            H      Om (Om symbol):     OM, AUM