Greeklish: An experimental interface for automatic transliteration

"Transliteration" in linguistics means the system of conveying as nearly as possible by means of one set of letters or characters the pronunciation of the words in languages written and printed in a totally different script. This term may be applied to a transcription in Latin letters of Greek, Hebrew, or the Slavonic languages written in the Cyrillic alphabet. We present in this article Greeklish, a Windows application that automatically produces English to Greek transliteration and back-transliteration (retransliteration). This transliteration is based on an algorithm with a table of associations between the two character sets. This table can be modified by the user so that it can cover personal preferences or formal present and future rules. The novelty of this system is its speed of operation, its simplicity, and its ease of use. Our examples use a Greek to Latin (English) alphabet mapping, but the Greeklish application can easily use any X to Latin mapping, where X is any non-Latin alphabet.