CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#cultureinfohebrew
Ovi
Ovi

Reputation: 2750

Convert text from English characters to Hebrew characters

Using C#, when a user types a text in a normal textbox, how can you see the Hebrew equivalent of that text?

I want to use this feature on a data entry form, when the secretary puts in the customer name using English characters to have it converted automatically in another textbox to the hebrew representation.

Maybe something with CultureInfo("he-IL")...

Upvotes: 2

Views: 6628

Answers (4)

Jonathan Marino
Jonathan Marino

Reputation: 1

You would be able to solve this problem using the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) in the middle. So, for example you can get the IPA from an english name through an API translator and then making an IPA to hebrew translation through this table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/Hebrew

Upvotes: 0

Mikeage
Mikeage

Reputation: 6554

You'll need to define your requirements better. Hebrew transliteration of English is not trivial (because of the ambiguities in English, rather than Hebrew: the Hebrew is actually well defined). Even if you want to translate phonetic sounds to Hebrew, you'll still have some issues to contend with (taf vs. tet, heh vs chet vs chaf (khaf)). Israel has no official standard that I've been able to find; road signs regularly feature inconsistent transliterations (from Hebrew to English, but I've seen it backwards as well)

There is a fairly well defined translation set in Rabbinic literature; believe it or not, the validity of a Rabbinic divorce document ("get") depends on it being perfectly accurate, which means that over the past few hundred years, Rabbis have standardized which sounds get mapped to which letters, but it's often influenced by Yiddish, and has extra letters put in (alephs, mostly) which modern Israelis would find puzzling.

I'm a native English speaker living in Israel, if that helps justify my skepticism.

Upvotes: 1

Stein G. Strindhaug
Stein G. Strindhaug

Reputation: 5119

I'll guess that's next to impossible, I don't know hebrew, but I do know from other languages that the pronounciation (and thus the transliteration) peoples names often (actually more often than not) differs a lot from the general pronounciation of the letters. This is because names change slower than the writing system, wich allso changes slower than the verbal language.

When transliterating you must base the transliteration on phonetics not the quirks of the other writing system, so the transliterator must essentially know both languages to some degree, and teaching a computer to understand languages verbally is still probably far into the future. You could of course just arbitarily select one of the symbols that could represent a sound in both languages, but this wil (undoubtedly) yeld hillarius results, and will probably not be much helpful.

Many languages (especially English) have very complicated and irregular pronounciation rules (in the case of English; apparently totally random*) and there is never an exact one-to-one relationship between writing systems (if it is you're probably talking about a symbol font not an actual writing system), so unless you have tought your computer to speak both languages fluently there's not much chance of automatic transliteration.

Upvotes: 1

Arnout
Arnout

Reputation: 2790

I didn't even know there was such a thing as Hebraization — thanks for asking this question :-)

This functionality is not provided by the .NET Framework, so I'm afraid you'd have to build it yourself. You'd have to know how the English is pronounced to provide the correct Hebrew transliteration — not an easy task, I think.

Upvotes: 4

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