What is really wanted is the ability to interpose another program
between Google and your screen. Arabic has 2 problems. One of then is
the script itself, the other is the fact that short vowels are
omitted.

There are in fact 2 translteration schemes. There is the "rough sound"
transliteration - no good for looking things up in the dictionary or
for doing serious work. The other is the Buckwalter system. This is
isomorphic one letter = one letter. Problem is - lower case is usually
pronounced the weay it sounds but with many - one Arabic - Latin there
are problems.

For example

$bAb - $abAb  (NOUN)

for youth. The $ = sh

Buckwalters's dictionary on which I have based my own electronic
dictionary gives 2 forms. The first being the way it is written
character for character, the second including the short vowels. Note
too that Arabic only has one case. Upper and lower case Latin refers
to different characters.

http://www.qamus.org/transliteration.htm

defines the transliteration system. I use XML friendly.

http://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/W/W08/W08-0511.pdf

Account of teaching Arabic.

http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~jonsafari/arabiclg/bin/arabiclg.html

You can download dictionary from here.


  - Ian Parker

PS Writing the software for stand alone is a trivial task. The thing
is to get Google to send you a template where you can input their HTML
into your program seamlessly. This isn't just Arabic, this is a very
general coordination problem. I too would be grateful for feedback on
this one.



On Nov 25, 1:40 pm, "N.K." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I wish Google Translate would also show the translation in the Roman
> alphabet.
>
> For someone learning a new language (say Arabic), it is easier to read
> the translation into Arabic when it is written in the Roman alphabet:
>
> Example: If "How Are You?" is also represented as "Kaifa haloka",
> rather than simply كيف حالك؟
>
> NK
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