ITRANS

The "Indian languages TRANSliteration" (ITRANS) is an ASCII transliteration scheme for Indic scripts, particularly for Devanagari script. 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. 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 (Marathi half-RA)
L / ld (Marathi LLA)
Y (Bengali)

Consonants with nukta under them (mainly for Urdu and 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

See also

• Devanagari transliteration
• IAST
• Harvard-Kyoto
• National Library at Kolkata romanization

External links

• Romanized Nepali Unicode Keyboard developed by OOPSLite Technologies
• ITRANS Official site
• HiTrans - Online ITRANS to Unicode converter with scheme extensions
• Online Interface to ITRANS - ITRANS to GIF, PS, PDF and HTML
• site on ITRANS and religious content in ITRANS
• View Unicode Hindi through Roman transliteration (ITRNS scheme)
• Downloadable ITRANS to Unicode transformer A simple Java applet demo, with source code. Uses a simple table based extendable algorithm.
• Google Indic Transliteration Online Indic Transliteration by Google
• [1] Devendra Parakh's Hindi word processor site
• Itranslator 2003 as a freeware from Onkarananda Ashram Himalayas
• Indian Language Transliteration for all users and programmers - Transliterates Bengali, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil and Telugu.