# Automatic transliteration of Arabic

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/automatic-transliteration-of-arabic/632907>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [August 28, 2012, 8:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/automatic-transliteration-of-arabic/632907 "2012-08-28T08:55:08Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![naita](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/naita/32/5862_2.png) [@naita](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/naita)\
**Post date:** [August 28, 2012, 8:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/automatic-transliteration-of-arabic/632907/1 "2012-08-28T08:55:08Z")

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Let’s say I’m curious about what fox is in Arabic. I look up the English word on wikipedia and jump to the Arabic equivalent article and get the word ثعلب  
I’m not so curious I’m going to learn to read Arabic, mainly because it looks really hard, so is there a computer solution to transliterate the word that doesn’t involve buying software?

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**Author:** ![Colophon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f05b48/32.png) [@Colophon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colophon)\
**Post date:** [August 28, 2012, 9:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/automatic-transliteration-of-arabic/632907/2 "2012-08-28T09:57:27Z")

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If you copy and paste the word into [Google Translate](http://translate.google.com) it will give you a phonetic transliteration underneath… or at least I’m sure it used to but I just tried it and it doesn’t any more!

Try this website: [Arabic Converter - Romanization Transliteration](http://mylanguages.org/arabic_romanization.php)  
It doesn’t work for me (in Chrome) but you might have more luck…

Edit: in IE it tells me the transliteration is “th’elb”. I believe the pronunciation is more like “tha’lab”, but the Arabic writing system doesn’t explicitly write all vowels, so an automated transliteration is never going to be great.

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**Author:** ![Reply](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/reply/32/15952_2.png) [@Reply](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Reply)\
**Post date:** [August 28, 2012, 10:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/automatic-transliteration-of-arabic/632907/3 "2012-08-28T10:04:31Z")

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Not sure about transliteration, but in Google Translate you can just push the speaker icon and it’ll say it out loud to you. Sounds like “tha leb”. You don’t even have to go through wikipedia first, just translate it directly from Google (if you don’t care about proper grammar).