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There are lots of Estonian language
speakers living far away from the areas where Estonian language is spoken.
There are lots of Estonian speaking travelers, traveling abroad each year without
their laptops.
There are lots of other Estonian speaking internet users having this reason or
another to lack for real or virtual keyboard in the Estonian language.
While browsing the Internet from abroad, all these people can read in their
languages in every modern browser, text processor or e-mail service.
BUT NOT WRITE!
Besides tens of various Latin based scripts there are some totally different alphabets. E.g. Cyrillic alphabet, Greek alphabet, Hebrew alphabet, Arabic alphabet, Armenian alphabet etc. It means that every single language has its special characters. Latin letter "a" alone has following variants in the other languages:
ä, à, á, â, ă, æ, å, ą, ā, ã, ạ, ằ!
These are not "a"'s. Even if this are not always formally parts of the corresponding alphabets, they denote different sounds. So, they are full scale different characters. They are also parts of some personal, brand and geographic names. As a result of impossibility to set up somebody else's computer and of unavailability of corresponding virtual keyboards the Estonian speaking Internet users experience the following difficulties:
1) Difficulty to type in Estonian alphabet: computers that are used in Internet cafes, hotels, post, at friends' or business partners' are not equipped with corresponding Estonian keyboards and their software can not always be easily switched into the Estonian language.
2) Exposure to the wrong Ads in irrelevant languages: unavailability of corresponding Estonian language software, hardware or Estonian virtual keyboards encourages people to transliterate their texts (they use English script to type in Estonian).
3) Difficulty to search: e.g. if one searches for a French text on "Prèsident" search engines return results on "President" in English which are not relevant for the French speaker. If one hopes to find German text on "Prasident", having no possibility to spell correctly "Präsident" search engine suggest him to switch again to English word "President".
4) Difficulty to log into favorite web-services: some Estonian internet services still encourage their users to log in with their names spelled with special characters of the Estonian alphabet.
So, we have recently started a multilingual project that
helps our users to write in over 30 different alphabets and scripts. The
principle we use in our virtual keyboards is called transliteration or
transcribing. It is a process that converts characters (letters) of one alphabet
(script system) into another.
The service is free of charge and we warmly encourage you using it. If you find
it useful, INFORM YOUR FRIENDS ABOUT IT.