Microsoft Indic Language Input Tool helps you enter Indian language text easily into any Microsoft Windows application. Microsoft Indic Language Input Tool (ILIT) Microsoft Indic Language Input Tool helps you enter Indian language text easily into any Microsoft Windows applications. The primary input mechanism is transliteration. Additionally, it provides a visual keyboard to assist with editing words that do not transliterate properly.

We bring to you a list of free, PC & Mobile compatible translation tools available in the market for all your language needs. Some tools allow you to directly add data and get an instant translation, others transcribe from the Latin script. But let’s first understand why were they devised? Were they really needed?

Census 2011 results states that :

Hindi, mother tongue to 44% of people in India, Bangla second most spoken, Marathi replaces Telugu in third place.
The percentage of the Indian population with Hindi as their mother tongue has risen to 43.63% from 41.03% in 2001.
While the percentage of people in India who listed Bengali as their mother tongue went up to 8.3% of the total population from 8.11%.
Bhili/Bhilodi, spoken in Rajasthan, was the most spoken unscheduled language with 1.04 crore speakers, followed by Gondi with 29 lakh speakers.
Marathi speakers as a percentage of the population grew from 6.99% in 2001 to 7.09%
Those returning Telugu as their mother tongue were down from 7.19% to 6.93%.
6 lakh people listed English as their first spoken language, of which 1.06 lakh alone, were in Maharashtra, followed closely by Tamil Nadu with the second-highest number of people with English as their mother tongue, while Karnataka stood third.
Sanskrit was the least spoken of the country’s 22 scheduled languages with the patronage of just 24,821 people, slotted below Bodo, Manipuri, Konkani and Dogri languages in terms of the number of speakers.

India has 255 million bilinguals, with 87.5 million trilinguals and those speaking more than three languages. That’s a quarter of the population who speaks more than just one language!

Hindi is the primary most spoken language of India with a user base of 551.4 million, with

422 million, listing it as their primary language,
98.2 million listing it as a second language and
31.2 million who listed it as their third.

Facts about Multilingual Languages

40% of Indian population is tech-savvy!
India offers about 475 million internet users (as of July 2019) to the world which was expected to grow to 627 million by 2019 end!
(second to China with 650million users.ie. 48% population).
While most Urban Indians are more likely to be multilingual, 136.7 million Rural Indians speak at least two languages!
Companies, however, continue ‘an English first approach’ when it comes to building solutions and platforms for India. This is by definition catering to a minority!
The 2001 Census revealed that English is the mother tongue to only around 2.6 lakh Indians with around 1 lakh only English features in the ‘Additional Language’ data from 2001 Census, that confirms English accounts for, only around 15% of the Indian population.

Google-KPMG report from 2017 on Internet Users shows that In a conscious strategy to reach out to more and more customers, some companies have started to use geo-fencing to provide local language interfaces and content. All users in a certain geographical region are welcomed with an official language spoken by most users in a region (excludes lesser spoken languages).

While Indic Language Readership Stats tells us that the traditional Media has shown greater loyalty to Indian languages! According to the 2017 Indian Readership Report, 39% of Indians read newspapers. The chart above shows the readership in Indic languages. This is reflected online too. 106 million Indians read online news in an Indic language, and 55 million of these users do so in Hindi. 99% of Indian language users use their mobile device to access the internet.

Baraha

Baraha software was released in January 1998 by Sheshadrivasu Chandrasekharan. It was introduced with an intention to provide a free, user-friendly Kannada language software to enable any non computer-savvy person to use Kannada on computer.

Other major Indian languages were added in the later years. Today millions of users across the world are using Baraha for creating documents in Indian languages. Baraha supports Devnagari, Gurumukhi, Kannada, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Gujarati, Punjabi, Bengali, Oriya, Sanskrit, Assamese, Konkani, Tulu, Nepali scripts, which would together enable users to write in 20 Indic languages.

Baraha is compatible with Microsoft Office, Open Office, WPS Office, Polaris Office, PageMaker, CorelDraw, Facebook, and many other applications. Baraha runs on Windows 10/8.1/8/7/Vista/XP. Baraha breaks the keyboard barrier for Indian languages by using a phonetic keyboard in which any word in any Indian language can be typed using the standard English keyboard.

Baraha user doesn’t feel any discomfort switching typing between Indian language text and English. Baraha software is available in three modes: free mode, trial mode and registered mode. Baraha was a freeware from 1998 to 2010 during which period, we added many languages and features while constantly upgrading to support the newer operating systems. Starting from version 10.0, Baraha has become a paid software with new features and Unicode fonts.

Quillpad

Quillpad is an intelligent predictive typing tool that enables you to type in Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, Telegu, Punjabi, Nepali, English using an English keyboard and intelligently converts the typed words into another script.

The website gives step by step detail on how to operate the tool on WindowsXP/2000, Windows 98/ME, WindowsNT. It also guides the users on which download path to follow, which drive/ directory to select(for eg. c:winntfonts instead of c:windowsfonts for WindowsNT), which supplemental files & fonts to enable/download, alongside their links to work with the editor

For eg.Malayalam requires Windows XP SP2 & Unicode font Kartika.ttf, Telugu Unicode font Gautami.ttf, Tamil Unicode font Latha.ttf, Devanagari Unicode font Mangal.ttf. Quillpad Editor needs Internet explorer 6.0 & encoding type is specified as Unicode. View -> Encoding -> Unicode(UTF-8). The user needs to restart their computer to update their system with the font files and the usp10.dll that handles the processing of Unicode scripts.

Google Translation

Google Translate is a very famous and a free multilingual machine translation service developed by Google, which translates text and websites from one language into another. The major features include :

Translate between 103 languages by typing
Tap to Translate: Copy text in any app and your translation pops up
Offline: translate 59 languages when you have no Internet
Instant camera translation: Use your camera to translate text instantly in 38 languages
Camera Mode: Take pictures of text for higher-quality translations in 37 languages
Conversation Mode: Two-way instant speech translation in 32 languages
Handwriting: Draw characters instead of using the keyboard in 93 languages
Phrasebook: Star and save translations for future reference in any language.

Translations between the following languages

Microsoft Indic Language Input Tool Sanskrit