Arabic transliteration converter

What it converts

• Arabic script, with or without vowel marks, in and out. Output can be plain or fully vowelled with tashkeel.
• Tfaddalu 3/7, the simplified romanization every guide on this site uses: capitals for the emphatic letters, 3 for ع, 7 for ح. The whole key fits on one page.
• Chat Arabizi, the numbers-and-letters spelling everyone texts in. It reads the common habits (2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 3', ou, ch) and writes the plain, no-capitals style people actually use.
• Elihay notation, the dotted scholarly system from J. Elihay's Speaking Arabic course and the Olive Tree dictionary (ḥ, ᶜ, ḫ, ṭ). If you study from those books, you can finally paste a line and read it without the phonetics chart.
• Academic romanization and IPA: ALA-LC-style letters with macrons and underdots, and the phonetic alphabet. These two are outputs only.

How it reads Arabic with no vowel marks

Written Arabic leaves the short vowels out. كتب could be katab (he wrote) or kutub(books), and the letters alone don't say which. No set of rules can recover those vowels, so tools that pretend to are guessing quietly.

This one guesses loudly instead. Every word is looked up in a Palestinian lexicon first; a hit comes back fully vowelled, the way it's actually said. A miss comes back as its bare consonant skeleton with a dotted underline, so you can see exactly which words are verified and which need a human. Add vowel marks to your input and the converter uses them directly, no lexicon needed.

The 3/7 system in one minute

Most transliteration needs a phonetics course before you can read it. Ours is built to be typed and read with zero training: capital S D T Z are the four emphatic letters (a capital never means anything else), 3 is ع because it looks like one, 7 is ح, and long vowels double up: mar7aba, 3arabi, ktaab. The full key, with audio, lives in the romanization guide.

Made for Palestinian Arabic

Generic converters assume Modern Standard Arabic. This one follows the dialect: ta marbuta endings come out -e after front sounds and -a after deep ones (madrase, but khuDra), the article assimilates the way people say it (ish-shams, 3al-fToor), and the lexicon behind it is the same corpus our lessons are built from. That's also why it knows that ذ often softens to z or d in speech, and which words keep the literary q.