Transliterate Greek Written in the Latin Alphabet into the Greek Alphabet

May 22, 2009 12:26 PM

I work in a public library and I have a library user that comes in and she wants to be able to type an email to her family in Greek using the regular keys on our keyboard and then transliterate the text into Greek characters. Any ideas about an application web or otherwise that will do that for her?
posted by zzazazz to computers & internet (16 comments total)

Is Stephen Morse's "Transliterate English to Greek" tool the kind of thing you're looking for? He has a whole bunch of similar tools (for Hebrew, etc) on his site. Here's Greek to English.
posted by arco at 12:30 PM on May 22

I looked at Morse's stuff but it didn't do what I needed.
posted by zzazazz at 12:33 PM on May 22

You can get windows machines to toggle back and forth between different scripts, I have mine set to switch between Latin, Russian and Arabic alphabets and it only took 10 minutes or so to do.

Oh, but this will only work if she can touch type on a standard Greek keyboard, because obviously the keys will still be labelled in English.

What version Operating System are the machines?
posted by atrazine at 12:54 PM on May 22

This comment is how you do it on XP.
posted by atrazine at 12:56 PM on May 22

On OSX I'm able to type in Cyrillic and Korean transliterated onto the regular English keyboard. Are there multiple layouts for Greek keyboards in the system settings?
posted by soma lkzx at 12:58 PM on May 22

We are still using XP at the library.
posted by zzazazz at 1:00 PM on May 22

Try translit.ru, it's in Russian but easy to use. Greek is second from the end in drop-down box (по-гречески). Then just use provided mapping.
posted by m1dra3 at 1:01 PM on May 22 [1 favorite]

My problem is our computers are locked down by our IT people and I can't changed the set up.
posted by zzazazz at 1:02 PM on May 22

Do I understand correctly that you're not trying to write in english "I saw a cat" and translate that to greek ("Είδα μια γάτα" according to the internets), the person wants to write out "Eioa uia yata" in english and get "Είδα μια γάτα"?

That's a tough one. There may be software to do this, but I'm unfamiliar with it. There are greek charecters in unicode you can access through the charecter map application on windows PC's, but that's a kludgey way to do it.
posted by anti social order at 1:04 PM on May 22

I'm not sure about XP, but on a Mac (if you have one there) you can open the International preferences, select "Show input menu in menu bar", then select Greek in the Input Menu.

Now, up in the menu bar, she will be able to drop down the flag icon and switch between the US keyboard and the Greek one, as she needs.
posted by iamkimiam at 1:05 PM on May 22

Yes, anti social order, that is exactly what I mean. I think I found something the internet doesn't already do. Someone should jump on this.
posted by zzazazz at 1:05 PM on May 22

Could the user write the letter on paper, then you could scan it and send it to her family as an attachment?
posted by robocop is bleeding at 1:11 PM on May 22

It's really hard because you're asking the computer to make a judgement call. When she types "yata" does it mean "γάτα" or "γάτά" or "γατα" or "γάτα"? And that's an easier example. I only mention it to say that the problem seems nontrivial.
posted by anti social order at 1:23 PM on May 22 [1 favorite]

How about http://gr.translit.cc/?
posted by jenh at 1:25 PM on May 22

http://www.typegreek.com

http://www.tero.co.uk/magictyper/greek.php

She needs to pick one and learn its conventions.
posted by westerly at 1:32 PM on May 22 [1 favorite]

Sweet, there isn't a question Ask Metafilter can't answer.
posted by zzazazz at 1:42 PM on May 22