This project is a culmination of ten years of academic research and literacy development both in the UK and the development of languages in Pakistan and India. The aim of the partnership is to facilitate electronic and written communication between people living in and originating from East (Indian) and West Punjabi (Pakistani) through the development of a Punjabi Language Transliteration Tool. The target groups will be Media organisations (such as magazines/newspapers), literary and literacy promotional organizations, writers and NGOs involved in dissemination activity amongst the urban and rural poor, virtual Punjabi community, schools and colleges. The intellectual background to this work has already been completed via a grant from the EU, Asia-ITC programme. The Punjabi University at Patiala has also developed Sangam a Gurmukhi to Shahmukhi Transliteration software. This project will develop the complementary Shahmukhi to Gurmukhi processor as well as facilitate use of these technologies on the web, thus enhancing networking between India and Pakistan.
Both online and offline versions of the transliteration software will be developed. The offline version will be a standalone application for Windows platform. The input will be Punjabi text written in Urdu script and encoded in Unicode, InPage format or popularly used shahmukhi fonts. The output will be transliterated Punjabi text in Gurmukhi script, encoded in Unicode, ASCII format and in popularly used Gurmukhi fonts. The online version will be a web application freely available to any one on the Internet. The user can copy paste Shahmukhi text in Unicode and the output will be transliterated Punjabi text in Gurmukhi script, encoded in Unicode.
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