Q: Is it possible to transliterate from Kannada into Hindi? I have the data in Microsoft Word 2003 doc file.

A: Surprisingly the answer is YES. Many people are not aware of this little feature built into Microsoft Word 2003. The steps are like this –
1. Save the document from Word as a text document and select ISCII Kannada encoding

2. Open the saved text document again using Word 2003 and select ISCII Hindi as the encoding.

That’s all one has to do. The trick employs the fact that the ISCII (Indian Script Code for Information Interchange) encoding for Indic is the same across all Indian languages. That means the ISCII code for Kannada “ka” and Hindi “ka” are the same. Thus the ISCII text document for Kannada and Hindi will be the same. In this example of transliteration, what we are doing is converting the Kannada Unicode document into ISCII document and then converting it back into Unicode. While doing so we are not converting it back into Kannada Unicode, but into Hindi Unicode encoding. This does the trick.