New transliteration web service – no more email ciphers!

August 17, 2005 — Dublin, Ireland — Latkey Ltd., the worldwide retailer of keyboard productivity accessories, releases a brand-new free transliteration web service for Microsoft® Office® that is accessible for everyone through their web site (http://www.latkey.com/translit).

This service uses latest Microsoft .NET® technology to allow users transliterate (convert) Latin-lettered text to other alphabets which is a common scenario for email conversations between people using PCs without any support for their local languages. Thousands of users speaking Arabic, Russian, Ukranian, Hebrew, Greek, Hindi, and other non-Latin languages, or people who communicate with those will find the tool noticeably useful.

Transliteration service (translit) was approved by Microsoft as a part of Office Marketplace program for Office extensions developers, and now is also listed at office.microsoft.com web site in the respective section.

When non-English fonts are not installed on a computer, or if locale-specific keyboard layouts are not available for the user (a good example is Internet cafes or employees working abroad), people use similarly sounding English letters to type words and phrases of their native language. For the prospective reader, it is much more difficult to comfortably read such “encoded” text. Many users would like to decode (transliterate) email text back to read it in their own alphabet. For instance, a word “fortune” transliterated from Russian using English letters will look like “udacha”. However its common readable interpretation in Cyrillic is “удача”. Some sounds that are specific only to Russian language are encoded with two or more English letters.

Latkey has introduced a web-based tool that does all encoding for the user right inside Internet Explorer® or Outlook®, a mailing program. And there’s no need to pre-install anything on the PC, which is not allowed anyway at most Internet café workstations or by employer policies. The text transliterator is implemented as a Microsoft Office web service integrated into Research Pane of Office 2003 or Internet Explorer. The recipient just needs to select an encoded text and choose “Look up” command in the context menu of Outlook email window. The encoded text is then transmitted over a network to the Latkey web service where it gets decoded, and then it gets sent back to client.

No need for a separate installation which removes any potential risk of virus coming from an unauthorized installation point. Updates to the conversion logic are also instantaneous; all service users enjoy improvements immediately after they were made to the web service. Integration to Outlook and Internet Explorer adds its nice one-click touch as well.

For more information, visit Latkey web site at http://www.latkey.com/translit.
Email: sales@latkey.com

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