# Hebrew written with Latin letters



## malva7

Shalom,
I often receive messages in _Hebrew_, but using _Latin alphabet_.
Does anybody know of an internet based resource to translate such sentences (or even single words) into English?

I have made an attempt in transliterating Latin letters into Hebraic ones, and then trying using on-line translators, but the result was catastrophic.

From what I gather it seems that transliteration is almost as complicated as learning the language itself...


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## Abu Rashid

Due to the large number of homophones (letters that sound the same) in Hebrew, it'd probably be quite difficult to machine translate latin transliterations of Hebrew.


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## OsehAlyah

Give Google translate a try. It isn't perfect but reasonably close. Here's what I got for your previous thread inquiry:
ata coll ha haim sheli = אתא חה קול חיים שלי

So most of it is correct except as Abu Rashid pointed out the software made a mistake and gave חה קול instead of הקול.

Here's the link. Select English as the From: language and Hebrew as the To: language
http://translate.google.com/#en|iw|


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## malva7

Well, the result I get is: אתא חה קול חיים שלי
Translating it then into English it gives "Ata ha my life sound".
Now, from my various independent on-line learning of Hebrew (actually "Heblish"), Ata = you ha = the
Putting it together it makes "You the my life sound", with a bit of imagination, could it then be:
Ata coll ha haim sheli = You make (the) my life sound (joyful/interesting)?


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## OsehAlyah

malva7 said:


> Putting it together it makes "You the my life sound", with a bit of imagination, could it then be:
> Ata coll ha haim sheli = You make (the) my life sound (joyful/interesting)?


Oh Wow. OK never mind. Google is actually introducing more confusion than is helping. As Abu Rashid said it is not really possible.  Sorry, although this forum is always there. 
The translation you got in the other thread is absolutely correct especially since it came from a Hebrew speaker.  Google is confusing הכול with חה קול.  The first one means The Whole the second means voice, poetically sound. But the second rendering is incorrect. This expression is rather common in modern Hebrew and in the other thread I even referred to a popular Top 40 song that includes this very expression.  Anwyay breaking it down into smaller bites yields:
You  - אתה
The whole life - כול החיים
Of Mine - שלי

As I said the translation you got in the other thread is absolutely correct, and is pretty much the only one out there.
"You are my whole life"


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## malva7

Thank you so much Oseh.
You've solved two puzzles of mine.
A. you given me the translation 
B. you've confirmed that no machine translation is possible


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## elianecanspeak

Part of the problem is that there are multiple transliteration systems and that there is also variation based on Ashkenaz v. Sephardic pronunciatiion of particular letters,


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## Egmont

malva7 said:


> ... B. you've confirmed that no machine translation is possible


I see the smiley, but that may be taking things a bit too far. When we change anything written in a character-based language into its phonetic equivalent, whether by transliterating or speaking it, we lose the information contained in its spelling. That makes translation harder. In conversation we replace this lost information by context, enabling us to tell the difference between the two identical-sounding phrases in the English sentence "I'll see you in Aisle C." With the two versions of "ha kol" in Hebrew here, we (as people) use a broader cultural context to decide that "You are all of my life" (more colloquially, ..."my whole life") makes more sense than "You are the voice (or sound) of my life."

A computer translation program has neither spelling nor context to go by, so its job is that much harder. Today's programs can't get this right consistently. Will tomorrow's be able to? The history of computing is full of statements that a computer doing something is "impossible." These statements have consistently been proven wrong. We may just have to wait a bit.


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## MuttQuad

elianecanspeak said:


> Part of the problem is that there are multiple transliteration systems and that there is also variation based on Ashkenaz v. Sephardic pronunciatiion of particular letters,


 
Quite so. There is no universally recognized system for transliteration of Hebrew into Latin characters, although in the past number of years one particular system -- not a very good one, imo -- was adopted by the American Conservative movement for use in their prayerbooks.

Interestingly, there is also no universally recognized transliteration system for Hebrew's sister language, Arabic. 

One of the problems, in the case of both tongues, is the representation of sounds that do not occur in English.


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## Ilya Kogan

MuttQuad said:


> Quite so. There is no universally recognized system for transliteration of Hebrew into Latin characters, although in the past number of years one particular system -- not a very good one, imo -- was adopted by the American Conservative movement for use in their prayerbooks.
> 
> Interestingly, there is also no universally recognized transliteration system for Hebrew's sister language, Arabic.
> 
> One of the problems, in the case of both tongues, is the representation of sounds that do not occur in English.



There is also an official transliteration system used by the Hebrew Language Academy.


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## MuttQuad

>>There is also an official transliteration system used by the Hebrew Language Academy. <<

It's only "official" to them. It is hardly in any sort of universal usage.


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## Ilya Kogan

MuttQuad said:


> >>There is also an official transliteration system used by the Hebrew Language Academy. <<
> 
> It's only "official" to them. It is hardly in any sort of universal usage.



You're right, the new system is not widely used, but the old system (which was official until 2006) can be seen all over Israel on the Israeli Road Company (מעץ) signs. The official road sings are very consistent in using the old transliteration system, and this is why you can see such surreal transliterations as *Zefat *(because according to the old system, צ = *z* and שווא נע = *e*), *Petah Tiqwa*, *Shave Ziyyon* and *Nes Ziyyona*. By the way, according to the new system the first two should be *Tsfat *and *Petah Tikva*.


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