Transliteration Guidelines

Thank you for coming forward to transliterate the scriptures into romanised script. By doing this free service you are helping the community that accesses the net and the devotees spread throughout the world. May the Lord, Who is called Asutosha as He is easily pleased, shower His non-withdrawing grace on you. This is a holy task and also a task that requires high attention as this is going to be used worldwide and may be for many generations. So it would be in all our interest to adhere to a set of guidelines to ensure conformance across these documents. Thanks a lot for your co-operation.

• Before you take up a transliteration task, please send across your willingness to take up transliteration work to . This could avoid wastage of effort if somebody else had already done the task you are planning to do or in the process of doing it.
• Please put your complete attention to the transliteration when sat for this task. It is of importance because these documents are going to reach very many people and any miss out of even a character may even change the meaning drastically.
• Read through the transliteration schema followed which is described in the page Transliteration scheme followed in the Shaivism Pages. Please stick to this convention.
• It would be preferable when multiple options are available for a character in the table (for example th and dh in thamiz table), to use the one that matches with the way it is pronounced also. (Instead of writing dhamiz you could write thamiz).
• Though there are two forms for the long vowels (like A and aa). Both are acceptable but the capitalised letter form (like A) is preferred.
• For the ancient scriptures the pAda bhEdhams would be specified (normally at the bottom of the page/song). These are the variations (aberrations) found in the various sources available for that scripture. (This would have happened because the one who documented would have misspelt the word. That is why utmost care is to be taken in not introducing in our effort these spelling errors). It is important to specify these pAda bhEdhams also in the transliterated text (may be at the end of the hymn/ page/ scripture).
• Do not break the blocks of words or join the blocks. Provide them as it is in the book.
• When completed the transliterated text could be proof read by you using the web utilities available. For this you could use the web tools and follow the procedures specified in Using Web tools for viewing the transliterated files.
  • If the tool reports of any error without giving the Indian Language output then there could be problem in the input you have given. From the page number it reports, you could pin point the error location in your input.
  • When it produces the Indian language output you could go through it line by line and checking it against the scripture book for any mismatches / misspelt words. When you find any mismatch immediately correct it in your file.
  • Once all the mismatches have been corrected run it again through the tool till you get satisfied that there are no more mismatches.
• Instead of doing it mechanically, it would be beneficial for you to involve and enjoy the scriptures (as much as possible) as you are coding. At the end of the work, this would give you the satisfaction of reading through these valuable scripture, apart from having made available these resources to the world.
• An example transliterated hymn

Please send your questions/comments/suggestions

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