Latin-Cyrillic (English-Russian) Transliteration Tool
While I’m barely literate in Russian, I occasionally find the need to type some of it, and for a while the translit.ru transliteration service did a great job. The interface was dead simple: use your regular Latin/English keyboard to type chto-nibud' and что-нибудь automagically appears as the letters are entered. Now that site is was broken, so yesterday I hacked together my own transliterator.
Technical note: I tested on Firefox 2 and Opera 9; other browsers might be OK. Except for Internet Explorer 6–that’s definitely not OK.
This tool comes in several forms. The simplest is just like the old translit.ru: a big text area, and text is transliterated by Javascript as you type. However, as I was already writing my own code, I could also add a feature I always wanted from translit.ru: the ability to transliterate text fields on any web page. So, I also made a bookmarklet and Greasemonkey user script version, which add a little [cyr / lat] control next to every text box.
- Transliteration web page (easiest option)
- Bookmarklet: translit (most useful. Drag that link to the bookmarks toolbar in your browser. Click the bookmark whenever you want a particular page transliterated. Updated 5 May 2007. The old version: translit old)
- User script (useful if you want certain pages always transliterated. Requires Firefox and Greasemonkey)
- source (for developers. a bzr branch)
After installing the user script, be sure to open the script manager, select “Latin-Cyrillic (English-Russian) Transliteration Tool” and modify the Included Pages so that it only matches sites you actually want transliterated. Otherwise, you’ll see [cyr / lat] next to every text box.
If you use this and enjoy it, think a happy thought, and I will sense it, and be happy.
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