A comprehensive roman (English)-to-Bangla transliteration scheme

Abstract

A transliteration scheme from Roman (English) to Bangla can help increase the use of Bangla in essential and diverse computing areas such as word processing, Internet and mobile communication and information query and retrieval. The Bangla script’s irregular phonetic nature and its large repertoire of consonant clusters (juktakkhors) create a large gap between the pronunciation and the orthography for a given Bangla word. In this paper, we describe a comprehensive Roman (English)-to-Bangla transliteration scheme that is designed to handle the full complexity of the Bangla script. We apply a phonetic encoding scheme to produce intermediate code-strings that facilitate matching pronunciations of input strings and the desired outputs. We also provide graceful degradation to a more conventional direct phonetic mapping in special circumstances. A prototype of our scheme shows significant success in test cases.