English Transliteration of Kannada Words with Anusvara and Visarga

Kannada is one of the frequently spoken languages of state Karnataka. It is descendents of Brahmi and one among the five Dravidian languages. Resources in Kannada are used by only those people who can read Kannada. Kannada language is spoken by most of the people in southern Indian state of Karnataka and in Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Goa. Type of writing system in Kannada is called alphasyllabary and very less amount of work is done in this area. Kannada literature remained limited only for those who know it, and we improved the access to Kannada literature by proposing a method for Kannada to English transliteration. Our input language is Kannada and the output language is English. Here, input word is divided into transliteration units and then mapped to output language. We proposed an approach which takes Kannada words as input and produces exact transliterations from Kannada to English with Anusvara (“O”) and Visarga (“:”) and gives results with 100% accuracy including numbers.