Arabic to English Transliteration
Paste Arabic and get it back in the Latin alphabet with the short vowels worked out from context rather than guessed. Free, no account, three styles depending on who will read it.
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Upload a file and see the quality for yourself. You get 100 free credits right now, with no sign-up and no card. When they run out, a free account gives you 200 more.
Why most Arabic transliteration is wrong
Converting Arabic consonants to Latin letters is a lookup table, and every tool online does it correctly. The consonants are not the problem.
Arabic is normally written without its short vowels. They are simply not in the text. To transliterate كتب you have to know whether it is kataba (he wrote), kutiba (it was written) or kutub (books) — and nothing in those three letters tells you. Only the sentence around it does.
A rule-based converter cannot solve this, because the information it needs is not in its input. That is why tools advertising perfect accuracy still produce vowels that a reader of Arabic can see are wrong. This tool reads the context first and then transliterates.
Which style should you use?
Academic
The Library of Congress (ALA-LC) standard, with macrons and under-dots: Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī.
Use for universities, journals and library records.
Easy to read
Plain letters only, nothing to install or special-case: Sahih al-Bukhari.
Use for websites, subtitles and ordinary readers.
Islamic books
The spellings Muslim readers already know: Muhammad, not Muḥammad.
Best for most Islamic material.
Going the other way?
This page converts Arabic script into Latin letters. If you want the reverse — typing in Roman letters and getting the native script back — that is a separate tool.
See all transliteration tools →Transliterating a whole book
This tool handles a passage at a time. If you are producing an English edition, the transliteration is one step of a longer job that also involves translation, digitizing the original if it only exists on paper, and typesetting the result so the Arabic and the Latin sit correctly on the page.
We do all of it. Send us a sample and we will show you the output before you commit anything.
Pasting text into this tool is free and unlimited. Uploading files is part of the paid packages, and one credit balance covers transliteration, translation and transcription alike. See packages →
Common questions
Is transliteration the same as translation?
No. Transliteration writes how a word sounds; translation says what it means. كتاب transliterates to kitāb and translates to book.
Does it work on text without harakat?
That is the case it is built for. Where the input does carry diacritics, those are followed exactly rather than re-derived.
Will it handle Quranic text correctly?
Quranic Arabic is fully vowelled, so it is the easiest case rather than the hardest. Anything published should still be checked by someone qualified.
Is it free?
Yes, with no account. Whole books are handled as a paid service.