Transliteration Arabic to English

Transliteration Arabic to English in one step: paste Arabic, press Translate, and under the English meaning you get the same text with harakat and in Latin letters. Pick Standard Arabic or a dialect and the letters follow that pronunciation. Free, no account, nothing stored.

What you get under your Arabic

• The English translation, so you know what the text means, not only how it sounds.
• Your Arabic again with full vowel marks (harakat), the step most transliteration sites skip. Without vowels no tool, human or machine, can romanize a word reliably.
• The transliteration itself, in the chat style described below, following the dialect you chose in the Dialect of your text menu.
• Listen, which reads the Arabic with your browser's Arabic voice, and Copy.

Most romanizers work one way and in Standard Arabic only. Here you can tell the tool that the text is Egyptian and جَمِيل will come back as gameel, while a Levantine قَلْب becomes 'alb. The reverse job, Latin letters into Arabic script, is on the English letters to Arabic page.

Transliteration Arabic to English: the letter scheme

The transliteration Arabic to English uses the spelling Arabs use when they type Arabic on a Latin keyboard. Three rules cover most of it. Long vowels are written twice (aa, ee, oo) and short vowels once. The throat sounds that English lacks get a digit: 3 for ayn and 7 for the breathy h. An apostrophe marks the glottal stop. Everything else is spelled so that an English reader says it roughly right.

Short vowels: fatha a, kasra i, damma u; a shadda doubles the consonant (مُحَمَّد mu7ammad). The article الْـ is written al-. Before a sun letter (t, th, d, dh, r, z, s, sh, l, n and their heavy versions) it assimilates: الشَّمْس ash-shams, النُّور an-noor.

Arabizi digits: 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

Arabizi, also called Franco-Arabic, is the full digit system from text messages. Each digit looks like the Arabic letter it stands for. The tool uses only 3, 7 and the apostrophe and spells the rest with letters, because kh and q are easier for an English reader than 5 and 8. The table lets you read messages that use all of them.

Variants with a quote mark exist too: 3' for ghayn, 7' for khaa, 6' for the heavy z. They are rarer and the tool never outputs them.

ALA-LC or chat style: which one you need

ALA-LC (and the similar ISO 233 and DIN 31635) is the library standard. Ayn becomes ʿ, the breathy h becomes ḥ, heavy consonants get a dot under them, long vowels get a bar (ā). Use it for a bibliography, a thesis, a catalog record or a museum label. A reader who does not know the system cannot pronounce it, but another scholar can recover the exact Arabic spelling.

Chat style is what you need to say the word, type it to a friend or sing along: 7abibi, yalla, inshallah. It loses the distinction between heavy and plain consonants but anyone can read it. This tool outputs chat style; for a dotted ALA-LC rendering of a book title, use a library table.

Country names in Arabic transliteration

A few names people look up, in the same scheme; note that some countries take the article الـ and some do not.

Limits

The tool romanizes the Arabic you paste and, when you translate into Arabic, the translation it produces. It does not turn Latin-typed Arabic back into script letter by letter. If you paste ana 3ayez, the model reads it as a sentence to translate rather than a word to convert. A text can be up to 1,000 characters; the site has one free daily limit, shown on the page when reached. Vowels and spelling are placed by an AI model from context. A rare name or a word that can be read two ways may come out differently from what you expected; the harakat line shows which reading was used. The Arabic to English translator is the same tool with the translation in front.

Frequently asked questions