Transliterator

What is transliteration?

Transliteration writes words in another script without translating them: the Russian "Привет" becomes "Privet" in Latin letters and still means hello. Writing a script in Latin letters is also called romanization. Each language has its own rules for it, and the transliterators follow these:

Tool description

Every transliterator here works the same way, from the general Transliterator to the ones for a single language, such as Russian to Latin or Latin to Korean: each starts on the scripts in its name, and the Source and Target menus switch to any other. Type or paste text and the result appears as you type, ready to copy. Characters that aren't in the source script, such as digits, punctuation and Latin words, stay as they are. The swap button turns the conversion around and makes the result the new input. Text is transliterated in your browser.

The Transliterator starts on Auto detect, which reads the text as the script most of its letters are in. Cyrillic with і, ї, є or ґ is read as Ukrainian, with ө or ү as Mongolian, and as Russian otherwise. Text in a script without a transliterator of its own, such as Chinese, Hebrew, Thai or Hindi, is read as "Any script" and written in Latin letters, Chinese in pinyin. Scripts that don't write all their vowels, such as Hebrew and Arabic without vowel marks, come out without them.

Between two scripts, such as Russian and Greek, the text goes through Latin letters. Hiragana and katakana convert into each other directly.

From Latin letters back

Latin letters can't hold everything the original script does, so going back is a best guess:

• Russian: ъ and ь, which romanization leaves out, don't come back, and y after a consonant becomes ы.
• Greek: each sound becomes the letter ELOT 743 writes it with most often, so i is ι, although it can also be η, υ, ει or οι, and o is ο rather than ω. An accent (á) becomes the tonos (ά).
• Arabic: the text should be in IJMES letters, with ā, ī and ū for long vowels and ḥ, ṣ, ṭ and ʿ for the letters English doesn't have. Short vowels aren't written in Arabic script.
• Japanese: type romaji such as "arigatou" or "gakkou". A long vowel can have a macron, as in "Tōkyō", or, for katakana, a hyphen after it: "ra-men" is ラーメン. Kanji in Japanese text stay as they are.
• Korean: the Revised Romanization spells words as they sound, so the result is the Hangul of how a word sounds: "Jongno" gives 종노, not 종로. A hyphen separates syllables: "jung-ang" is 중앙, while "jungang" is 준강.

Examples