1. A method of multi-lingual speech recognition, the method comprising: determining whether characters in a word are in a source list of a language-specific alphabet mapping table for a language; converting each character not in the source list according to a general alphabet mapping table and, where such conversion is performed, converting each converted character according to the language-specific alphabet mapping table for the language; verifying that each character in the word is in a character set of the language; removing characters not in the character set of the language; and identifying a pronunciation of the word.