In trying to translate an English word into some languages, e.g. Hebrew, I get an answer in Hebrew script, which I don’t read. How can I get the Hebrew word in its Roman alphabet form?
ETA: I’ve used translate.com, Google, and Bing.
There are often automated romanization tools you can find by just searching “hebrew roman transliteration” or “hebrew to roman alphabet converter” and the like. Note that for some languages this is non-trivial and sometimes you’ll need to specify metaparameters. Especially languages that elide/imply vowels (like Hebrew) or omit spaces (like Japanese) and it’s not 100% easy to distinguish things like word boundaries or disambiguate non-homophonic homographs via an automated system. Additionally, some languages have multiple types of romanization. Japanese has two common transliteration systems, for instance, one (well, two… sort of) that Japanese people tend to use that has a 1:1 character/kana correspondance, and the Hepburn system commonly used by westerners trying to read Japanese which is more phonetic*. You’d have no way of knowing which you want without some research (granted you’d likely stumble upon a Hepburn romanizer by searching in English).
This tool, for instance, requires you to enter some parameters to disambiguate different forms of Hebrew. This one does not, and not being a Hebrew speaker I can’t say how accurate it is.
- Every aspect of this explanation is actually more complex and requires an asterisk to signal that, but I’m not going into more detail because it’s not particularly relevant.
(Admittedly I’m not entirely sure how easy it is for an automated system to intuit binyans and noun patterns and all the other stuff that imply vowels.)
Essentially, imagine I’m trying to phonetically represent English in another language. It’s not necessarily trivial to detect which pronunciation of “read” you want since it’s context based (since the present and past tense are spelled the same but pronounced differently).
Wiktionary seems to have transliterations next to the words in the “Translations” section.
Note that an “automated romanization” tool for Hebrew is potentially tricky to implement since vowels are not indicated in the text. Jragon’s two links solve that problem by not even bothering to put them in…
This page purports to fill in the vowels. I tried giving it ambiguous words akin to “read” and it just prints all the alternatives.
If you then cut and paste the results into Jragon’s “Automated Hebrew Transliteration” page, the vowels appear as expected.