Soon, You’ll Be Able To Navigate Google Maps In Odia & Other Indian Languages

Very soon, Google Maps can be used in Odia language.

Google will be adding automatic transliteration for 10 Indian languages in Google Maps.

Names of most Indian places of interest are not written in native languages in Google Maps. Hence this feature will benefit thousands of users in India who do not speak English. It will help them in finding doctors, hospitals, grocery stores, banks, bus stops, train stations and other essential services in their own language.

Odia apart, Google will provide this feature in Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam and Punjabi languages.

“Common English words are frequently used in names of places in India, even when written in the native script. How the name is written in these scripts is largely driven by its pronunciation. For example, एनआईटी from the acronym NIT is pronounced ‘en-aye-tee’, not as the English word NIT. Therefore by understanding that NIT is a common acronym from the region, Maps can derive the correct transliteration. In the past when Maps could not understand the context of एनआईटी, it would instead show a related entity that might be farther away from the user. With this development, we can find the desired result from the local language query. Additionally, users can see the Places Of Interest names in their local language, even when they do not originally have that information,” explained Google Maps software engineer Cibu Johny.