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language transliteration help..

warhero

7/12/2007 3:12:00 PM

What is a good place to read about language transliteration? I have a
piece of software that I want to provide language transliteration
options.. Is there something in Ruby to do this.. (probnot). Just
looking for a push in the right direction.. thanks all

--
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8 Answers

alex_land

7/12/2007 11:36:00 PM

0

On Jul 12, 5:11 pm, Aaron Smith <beingthexempl...@gmail.com> wrote:
> What is a good place to read about language transliteration? I have a
> piece of software that I want to provide language transliteration
> options.. Is there something in Ruby to do this.. (probnot). Just
> looking for a push in the right direction.. thanks all
>
> --
> Posted viahttp://www.ruby-....

Hi Aaron:

Here are a few sources (i can't say i've looked at all Sites of this
type, but the one's i'm giving you, i have looked at and used):

1. ForeignWord (http://www.foreignword.com/defau...) list and
discusses many translation Apps (i'm using that term to include both
translation and transliteration, as they do, until they begin
discussing particular Apps);

2. Not sure if you wanted actual translit tables for particular
langauges, but if you do, then i would suggest the Princeton Library
(what i'm giving you the link to is entirely public access)-e.g.,
here's an English-Azerbaijani translit table:
http://library.princeton.edu/departments/tsd/katmandu/sgman/...

3. Lastly, i wrote some translit scripts about two years ago (for
about two dozen languages, Romance languages, Germanic, and Slavic);
they are in C++ (absolutely no reason i did not code in Ruby other
than i didn't know it well enough at the time); I put them in one of
the major C++ repositories. If you have SVN and want these, let me
know.

HTH,

-alex

John Joyce

7/13/2007 12:08:00 AM

0


On Jul 12, 2007, at 6:40 PM, alex_land wrote:

> On Jul 12, 5:11 pm, Aaron Smith <beingthexempl...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> What is a good place to read about language transliteration? I have a
>> piece of software that I want to provide language transliteration
>> options.. Is there something in Ruby to do this.. (probnot). Just
>> looking for a push in the right direction.. thanks all
>>
>> --
>> Posted viahttp://www.ruby-....
>
> Hi Aaron:
>
> Here are a few sources (i can't say i've looked at all Sites of this
> type, but the one's i'm giving you, i have looked at and used):
>
> 1. ForeignWord (http://www.foreignword.com/defau...) list and
> discusses many translation Apps (i'm using that term to include both
> translation and transliteration, as they do, until they begin
> discussing particular Apps);
>
> 2. Not sure if you wanted actual translit tables for particular
> langauges, but if you do, then i would suggest the Princeton Library
> (what i'm giving you the link to is entirely public access)-e.g.,
> here's an English-Azerbaijani translit table:
> http://library.princeton.edu/departments/tsd/katmandu/sgman/...
>
> 3. Lastly, i wrote some translit scripts about two years ago (for
> about two dozen languages, Romance languages, Germanic, and Slavic);
> they are in C++ (absolutely no reason i did not code in Ruby other
> than i didn't know it well enough at the time); I put them in one of
> the major C++ repositories. If you have SVN and want these, let me
> know.
>
> HTH,
>
> -alex
>
>
>
>
Hey this should be relatively painless, depending on the languages
involved. There are many ways to describe phonetics and phonemes.
Most languages view themselves in their own way of interpreting
phonemes. So you should aim for transliterating for the target
audience's language's phonetics.
Some languages have writing that is highly non-phonetic. English is a
great example of a terrible system of writing. As native speakers, we
believe it is phonetic writing, and it arguably is, but it's a mess
of contradictory patterns of symbols that represent multiple phonemes
and multiple patterns for the same phonemes.
Japanese has highly regular phonemic structure, but its own
Romanization system(systems) which are close to most of the
continental European languages that use Roman Alphabetic characters,
but is not consistent with English. (nothing is)
This is why linguists have a fairly well-established set of formal
academic phonemic characters that don't really make much sense to non-
academic linguistics people.
English alone has many phonetic description systems in use in various
dictionaries.
It is always a great project to do something like this. So, I do
encourage you to develop it, but might find more complexity than you
expect.
You might find unicode.org to have some useful insights into some of
this. You might also want to look into unicode for this purpose.
Their recent GIANT book Unicode 5, is an excellent resource and a
fascinating book, but it is really BIG and not cheap. That said,
almost any university with a computer science or linguistics program
should have at least one copy of it in their library!

John Joyce

warhero

7/13/2007 12:20:00 AM

0


> 3. Lastly, i wrote some translit scripts about two years ago (for
> about two dozen languages, Romance languages, Germanic, and Slavic);
> they are in C++ (absolutely no reason i did not code in Ruby other
> than i didn't know it well enough at the time); I put them in one of
> the major C++ repositories. If you have SVN and want these, let me
> know.
>
> HTH,
>
> -alex


Thanks for the help. I would definitley like to see those pieces of
code..

Thanks much.
-Aaron

--
Posted via http://www.ruby-....

Robert Parker

7/13/2007 12:31:00 AM

0

On 7/13/07, Glen Holcomb <damnbigman@gmail.com> wrote:
> Nothing I know of but it sounds like a good thing to use a hash for.

Maybe not. There is usually no 1 for 1 correspondence between words of
different languages. It needs context to determine the translated
meaning.

Bob

warhero

7/13/2007 12:53:00 AM

0

So i just found out I don't need full transliteration. I need to support
different character encodings. What does Ruby offer in that area?

--
Posted via http://www.ruby-....

John Joyce

7/13/2007 2:17:00 AM

0


On Jul 12, 2007, at 7:30 PM, Robert Parker wrote:

> On 7/13/07, Glen Holcomb <damnbigman@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Nothing I know of but it sounds like a good thing to use a hash for.
>
> Maybe not. There is usually no 1 for 1 correspondence between words of
> different languages. It needs context to determine the translated
> meaning.
>
> Bob
>
Not words but phonetics. OP said transliteration.
A dictionary, would be words in language A to words in language B.
Translation would include grammar and context for a larger meaning.

Robert Parker

7/14/2007 8:33:00 AM

0

On 7/13/07, John Joyce <dangerwillrobinsondanger@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Jul 12, 2007, at 7:30 PM, Robert Parker wrote:
>
> > On 7/13/07, Glen Holcomb <damnbigman@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> Nothing I know of but it sounds like a good thing to use a hash for.
> >
> > Maybe not. There is usually no 1 for 1 correspondence between words of
> > different languages. It needs context to determine the translated
> > meaning.
> >
> > Bob
> >
> Not words but phonetics. OP said transliteration.

You are right, I read the OP carelessly. Even so the argument still
applies for some languages. Eg English-Thai requires a mapping between
1 Thai symbol to a pair of symbols in English for many Thai consonants
and also most vowels. Not only that, Thai has 44 sounds for consonants
beginning a syllable but only 8 sounds for those at the end.

Cheers Bob

warhero

7/15/2007 4:13:00 PM

0

Wayne E. Seguin wrote:
> On Jul 12, 2007, at 11:11 , Aaron Smith wrote:
>> What is a good place to read about language transliteration? I have a
>> piece of software that I want to provide language transliteration
>> options.. Is there something in Ruby to do this.. (probnot). Just
>> looking for a push in the right direction.. thanks all
>
> Not entirely sure this is what you are asking but this is what we're
> using for multi language support.
> http://www.yotabanana.com/hiki/ruby-gettext.html?ru...

I think this is exactly what i'm looking for.. thanks much..

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