Inside the Chakra Darshana application, there are many useful facilities that might be of interest on their own, not just within the very specialized area of Vedic astrology. We would like to make these facilities available for everyone over the Web and today we are launching a new part of this website, called “Chakra Darshana tools”, which is dedicated specifically to these facilities: tools.chakra.lv.

The first tool to become available is the Sanskrit transliteration tool. It allows to transliterate between different methods of Sanskrit transliteration, including Harvard-Kyoto and the International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST):

Many similar tools exist online that deal very well with a wider range of transliteration methods. Still, this tool is useful, because it does not only work with “lossless” transliteration methods, but also provides a way to transliterate into ordinary text without diacritics. Also, it works not only for the English language, but for the Russian language as well. For instance, it allows to transliterate “Kṛṣṇa” as “Krishna” in English or “Nārāyaṇa” as “На̄ра̄йан̣а”, “Нарайана” or “Нараяна” in Russian.

We are also publishing a blog post on transliterating Sanskrit into Russian, which was an interesting technical challenge.