A guide to English to Tamil translation

The Tamil language is used largely in India. It is one of the oldest languages with Tamil literature dating back two thousand years. It is estimated that there are around 65 million Tamil speakers in the world. In this article, have a look at a few English to Tamil translation services that are widely available on the internet.

Lanka.info

This site offers a very simple, but surprisingly in-depth service that is also very detailed. Users can translate words from English to Tamil or Sinhala. Once the user types the word in English, the site then translates it in the chosen language. The translation is displayed in a large window that also gives a couple of derivatives of the word. For instance, if you type 'friend', it gives the options for friendly, and friendship as well. Along with the added option of a handy random word-of-the-day option, the site also gives pronunciations of the word that you have chosen to translate.

Vengayam.net

The next site is just as comprehensive, but it uses a slightly different approach. Rather than translating word by word, this site allows users to translate complete phrases. This approach is beneficial because it gives you the complete phrasing with context rather than trying to get the context from the individual words. This site also benefits by giving the user a crash course in writing the language, explaining how certain letters touching each other will create a different syllable and therefore changing the meaning of the phrase. It would help if this was an automated feature, but in this case, at least it provides a starting point and a useful lesson for the user.

Tamilpadi.com

Combining both of the above sites, this free dictionary gives users the ability to translate phrases and individual word whilst also providing a selection of random words. The site is very simply-designed, but the translation bar could be easy to miss if you do not look for it. The larger window with the random word translation does catch the user’s eye more directly, and as such, this might confuse a first time user. Like all of the sites looked at the design is simple. There isn’t a lot of pictures or adverts popping up to distract or slow down the user. Instead, they are left to do their translation work and leave the site with the results.