What do we mean by transliteration?
With the term transliteration we mean the use of internationally accepted characters (the characters of the latin alphabet) to symbolise languages that use their own set of fonts.

Why transliterate a text?
The need to transliterate texts became gradually odvious as the cooperation between different countries grew stronger. Transliteration became necesary in order to make comunication possible. The need for use of a common set of characters known to everyone (or at least to as many as possible) obliged countries all over the world to determine rules for the correct transileration of texts. The reason for this was to conserve, even after the change of characters, the proper actual meaning of each word (through the correct grammar and pronunciation). Unfortunatelly the result is, that the formal rules for transliteration (used on documents such as passports) are much to complicated for the average person to get accustomed with and use.

Why are we concerned with transliteration?
Appart from formal documents, transliteration finds another very important use on the Internet. Internet users that communicate in languages other that english, often transliterate their texts in order to avoid compatibility problems which occur while trying to send a text through the net. This kind of transliteration does not follow any formal rules and the code used is a defined by each user and what he or she finds easier to understand. Almost all languages have got special characters which get substituted with latin ones that sound alike. German, French, and even more Greek, Russian, Bulgarian, Indian and many others.

Why have we got a problem with transliteration as it is getting done today?
Greeks as you may have heard are especially sensitive about subjects concerning their language. There has been lots of fuss made concerning this "new" way of writing the greek language which seems to be taking over especially amongst young people. Some believe, and with just cause, that this new way will gradually replace proper greek. It is true that lots of the characteristics that are vital for understanding the meaning of a text get lost when someone transliterates without following any kind of rules. But the worst thing is that people are getting used to reading and writing this kind of text and are starting to use it even more often and when not necessary.

What to we propose?
Here at the Demokritus University of Thrace we have thought of a way to avoid reading and writing transliterated text. We've designed a program that does it for you! The name of the program is "Greeklish" as we call here in Greece the writing of greek text with english letters.

What does GREEKLISH do?
What our program does is transliterate text. It allows the user to write greek text and then mayde e-mail the transliterated text or to receive transliterated text, de-transliterate it and after that use it like any normal text. It works in the Windows environment and is very easy to use.

What about transliterating rules?
The clever thing is that you don't have to follow any difficult transiterating rules. You can create your own! The program gives you the chance to create your own correspondance table so you can direct the transliteration according to the rules you're used to using. The best thing to do is to try out the program which you can download from our university site.

Download the program free!
The best thing to do is to try out the program which you can download from our university site. From pericles.ee.duth.gr/greeklish . You can pay us back by sending us any kind of comments or suggestions on how to make our program better.