How to implement multi-transliteration efficiently

It is nothing new that we process Pali data in our project SeNeReKo. As Pali has no own writing system these texts originally have been written in devanagari, singhalese and burmese script. Nowadays we use a latin based script with diacritica, the so called Rhys-Davids transliteration. (See Wikipedia for details.) But we nowadays use other transliterations as well: Especially the Harvard Kyoto Convention is common to avoid diacritica and therefore simplifies the writing of Pali words to some extent.

The problem: Multiple Transliterations

Regarding these writing system an interesting problem arose in our project lately. As we build technical systems to process Pali words we wanted to support more than one transliteration of Pali. As it is unreasonable to store all data in various transliterations in parallel in our database, we developed a converter system that is is capable of transliterating data on the fly as needed. Weiterlesen