Microsoft Transliteration Utility v1.0 (TU)

The Microsoft Transliteration Utility is a tool for transliterating one natural language script to another. It is intended to support all scenarios that involve an entirely mechanical mapping of strings encoding natural language data in one format to strings encoding that data in another format. It also has a feature that allows the creating, editing, debugging and testing of modules that define the transliteration.

Some examples of natural language transliteration modules are (de)romanizers (script X <--> Latin script), (de)normalizers (stripping/adding certain accents and/or transforming them into punctuation, etc.) and proprietary font <--> Unicode converters.

Transliteration modules used by this tool are described using a rule language. Simple modules use only a subset of the language features and their descriptions effectively reduce to tables mapping character sequences in the source script to corresponding character sequences in the target script. More complex modules add context-based constraints so that the same source character sequence may correspond to different target character sequences depending on the environment the source sequence appears in.