Blogger, Gmail, Orkut and a few other Google services offer transliteration facility by default so you can easily type characters in Hindi, Tamil & other popular Indian languages using the standard English (Roman) keyboard.

Here’s a quick demo of transliteration - you type Hindi words phonetically in English script and tool will automatically convert them into corresponding Hindi words.

Indic transliteration tools are pretty useful for typing text in Indian languages without having to memorize any complex sequence of characters but the problem is that not all websites support transliteration yet. For instance, if you need to edit a Hindi entry in Wikipedia or need to type a document in Telugu using Google Docs, it may not be that straight forward a process if you are used to the English keyboard.

Well not anymore. Google has released some useful transliteration bookmarklets that will help you type characters in your language on any website. These bookmarklets are available for Hindi, Arabic, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam.

To give this feature a try, drag the [Type in Hindi](javascript:(t13nb=window.t13nb||function(l){var t=t13nb,d=document,o=d.body,c=“createElement”,a=“appendChild”,w=“clientWidth”,i=dc,s=i.style,x=oa;if(o){if(!t.l){t.l=x.id=“t13ns”;oa.id=“t13n”;i.innerHTML=“Loading transliteration”;s.cssText=“z-index:99;font-size:18px;background:#FFF1A8;top:0”;s.position=d.all?“absolute”:“fixed”;s.left=((o[w]-i[w])/2)+“px”;x.src=”http://t13n.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/blet/rt13n.js?l=“+l}}else setTimeout(t,500)})(‘hi’)) bookmarklet on to your browser favorites.

If you need help, check this video tutorial on how to install bookmarklets.

That means you can now write Hindi messages in Google Chat using English keys or update Facebook status in your native language or even leave comments in an Arabic blog. The other big advantage is that you can now perform searches on Google and other places in your own language as shown in this screencast: