Bengali to English Transliteration

Why the output says "kalakātā" and not "Kolkata"

Bengali letters carry a built-in vowel when nothing else is written. In Sanskrit and Hindi that vowel is an a, and the romanization standards were built around that. In Bengali it is closer to an open o, which is why the city written কলকাতা is said "Kolkata" but transliterates letter by letter as kalakātā.

Neither column is a mistake. A transliteration standard maps letters, so that the original spelling can be rebuilt from the result and two different Bengali words never collapse into one Latin spelling. Everyday English spellings map sounds instead, which reads better aloud and loses that reversibility. If you need the version that appears on a passport or a street sign, you want the second column, and no automatic tool produces it reliably.

If you came here to type Bengali, read this first

Most searches for "English to Bengali transliteration" are looking for a Bangla typing tool: you type amar nam on an ordinary keyboard and you get আমার নাম. That is the opposite direction from this page, and we have not shipped it, because the easy version of it is wrong most of the time.

Bengali distinguishes sounds that English spelling does not, so a word typed in Latin letters usually has several valid readings and only one is the word you meant:

A letter-mapping table cannot choose between those columns, because what you typed does not contain the information needed to choose. The tools that do this well, Google's input method and the open-source GoVarnam among them, generate every candidate the table allows and then pick between them with a dictionary of real words, usually offering a list to choose from. We tested the table-only approach on a related script, Tamil, and it scored three correct words out of ten. That is the reason this direction is missing rather than approximate.

Bengali, Bangla, and the script Assamese shares

Bangla is what speakers call the language; Bengali is the English name for it. They are the same language, so "Bangla transliteration" and "Bengali transliteration" are the same request, and the selector in the tool says Bengali only because the interface is in English.

The writing system is formally the Bengali-Assamese script, shared with Assamese and with Manipuri as written in India. Assamese uses ৰ where Bengali uses র, and ৱ where Bengali uses ব. The tool applies Bengali readings, so Assamese text converts but those two letters will not come out the way an Assamese reader expects.

There is more than one romanization of Bengali

Which system you want depends on what you are doing, and they disagree on the same word:

The last row is the one with no standard behind it, which is exactly why automatic tools cannot reproduce it: "Kolkata", "Calcutta" and "Kolkota" are all spellings people actually use for the same word.

Where the conversion data comes from

We are not linguists and we do not invent romanization rules. Bengali conversion runs on the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository transliteration data through PHP's Transliterator class, the same ICU implementation browsers and operating systems use, following ISO 15919. Bengali output is passed through unmodified, unlike our Devanagari-based languages, where we apply two documented adjustments. Which language gets which treatment is listed on the About page.

What this tool does not do

• It does not translate. নমস্কার comes back as namaskāra, which is how it is written. What it means is "greetings", and that is a translator's job.
• It does not type Bengali for you. English to Bangla needs a dictionary-backed input method, not a conversion table.
• It does not spell names the way documents do. You get the standard romanization, not the conventional English form.
• It transliterates, it does not transcribe. The output reflects the letters that are written, so it will not show you the vowel reductions and silent endings that Bengali pronunciation actually has.