Itrans

ITRANS is an ASCII transliteration scheme used to render Indic scripts in plain ASCII text. It maps characters from scripts such as Devanagari, Bengali, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu to sequences of ASCII characters. The scheme enables typed input on standard keyboards and convenient processing by search engines, databases, and linguistic software, while preserving readability for readers familiar with the transliteration. ITRANS covers independent vowels, consonants, diacritics, as well as conjunct consonants, anusvara, visarga, and other phonetic modifiers through explicit ASCII sequences. Conjuncts are represented by combining sequences, allowing accurate representation of complex syllables without requiring native script support.

ITRANS was developed in the 1990s to support computational processing of Indian languages and Sanskrit, bridging the gap between traditional scripts and ASCII-based tools. It gained widespread use in digital libraries, linguistic research, and early web content, and remains a reference scheme in many NLP and scholarly projects. Conversion tools exist to transcode between ITRANS and Devanagari and other scripts, enabling interchange with Unicode-based text. Because ITRANS is a transliteration scheme rather than a native encoding, translations to Unicode and back may depend on mapping conventions, which can lead to occasional ambiguity for certain clusters.

Today ITRANS is one of several transliteration schemes used for Indian languages; many projects have shifted toward Unicode-native input methods, but the ITRANS mapping remains influential for historical corpora, educational materials, and compatibility with legacy software. Related schemes include IAST and other ASCII transliteration conventions.