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About Transliteration
Transliteration is a free tool for converting text into the Latin alphabet. This page says who builds it, which romanization standard each language follows, and where those standards come from, because for a tool like this those are the things worth knowing.
Who Builds This
Transliteration is developed and operated by Space Bits, S.L., a company registered in Spain (NIF ESB64776271, Manresa, Barcelona). Full company details, including our commercial registry entry, are on our Legal Notice page.
Web developer. Responsible for the transliteration engine, the Unicode handling and the site itself.
LinkedInWhy We Built Transliteration
Most transliteration tools online treat every input the same way: run every word through one fixed set of rules and hope for the best. That approach breaks down often, because pronunciation-based conversion has real ambiguity: the same word can sometimes be represented more than one accepted way in the target script.
Our engine combines a curated dictionary of common words and exceptions, which resolve exactly, with a rule-based phonetic engine as a fallback for everything else. We're upfront in our FAQ about which romanization system each language pair follows and where results can vary between tools, rather than overselling accuracy we can't guarantee.
The site itself is organized around focused sections for the languages we currently support, rather than one page trying to rank for everything without context.
Where Each Conversion Comes From
We don't invent our own romanization standards. Each language is based on an established standard or a specialist-maintained library, and where we adjust the output we say exactly how. This is what each one uses:
| Language | Standard | Implementation / source |
|---|---|---|
| Chinese | Hanyu Pinyin | overtrue/pinyin, an open-source library with word-level dictionary matching |
| Japanese | Hepburn-style | Unicode CLDR, via ICU (kana only; kanji are left unchanged) |
| Korean | Revised Romanization of Korean | Unicode CLDR, via ICU |
| Russian | BGN/PCGN-style | Unicode CLDR, via ICU |
| Tamil, Hindi, Marathi, Malayalam, Telugu, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Punjabi |
ISO 15919-based, with documented pronunciation adjustments | Unicode CLDR, via ICU, plus two adjustments of ours (see below) |
About the CLDR rows. These use the Unicode CLDR transliteration data, accessed through the ICU library. CLDR's stated policy is to follow established authorities where they exist; for several scripts these are the romanization tables of the UNGEGN Working Group on Romanization Systems, the United Nations body that agrees romanization systems for geographical names.
Our two adjustments to the Indic output. We remove the disambiguation apostrophes ICU inserts, and we drop the silent word-final vowel that these languages write but do not pronounce, so that धन्यवाद reads as "dhanyavad" rather than "dhan'yavada". Both changes are documented in the source code.
To be precise about what this means: the result is a derived romanization, not strict ISO 15919. CLDR's own Indic transliterations already depart from the standard in places, partly to stay reversible, and our schwa adjustment departs from it further. We optimise for a reader who wants to know how a word sounds. If you need output that conforms exactly to ISO 15919 for academic or bibliographic use, this tool is not the right source.
Get in Touch
Found an incorrect conversion, have a feature request, or just want to say hello? We'd like to hear from you.
Contact UsChangelog
- Documented the romanization standard and implementation source for every supported language, including the two adjustments we make to the Indic output.
- Named who builds the site, and stated plainly that we are not linguists and rely on external standards.
- Added Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada and Punjabi, bringing the total to thirteen languages.
- Published a full explanation of what transliteration is, including how it differs from translation and transcription.
- Added Malayalam to Latin romanization, bringing the total to nine languages.
- Clarified throughout the site that every conversion here is romanization: transliteration into the Latin alphabet specifically.
- Launched with eight languages: Chinese, Tamil, Hindi, Japanese, Russian, Korean, Bengali and Telugu, all converting into the Latin alphabet.
- Added automatic detection of the source writing system, so pasting text is usually enough.
- Chinese uses word-level dictionary matching rather than character-by-character conversion, which resolves readings that change depending on the word.
- With the research done, we began building the tool in whatever time we could set aside between other work.
- The first decision was scope: only conversions into the Latin alphabet, and only where an established standard already existed to follow.
- We noticed how often people need to read a name or a phrase written in a script they can't read, and how much of what's available online returns a translation instead of a transliteration.
- We spent the following weeks researching romanization standards and what existing tools actually do.
Last updated: 26 August 2026