Name Translator

Intelligently translate names based on spelling, phonetics, and meaning

Overview

Machine translation for names

High-quality machine translation is a work in progress for languages such as Arabic, Chinese, Russian, and Korean, but Rosette® has solved the very specific and ubiquitous problem of translating names. Human translators are excellent at translating sentences, but computers are superior when it comes to consistently applying complex transliteration standards to translating names.
Whether for gisting reports or translating entire name directories, Rosette’s name translator is fast and produces consistent spellings.

Accurate and smart

Rosette translates names using its knowledge of language-specific naming conventions. Our name translation tools are trained to recognize when to transliterate a name (based on spelling or sound), and when to translate the meaning (as with a personal title like “King”).
The name translator produces highly accurate, standardized English translations based on linguistic algorithms and statistical modeling. Rosette supports name translation in complex, non-Latin languages — such as Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew, Korean, Persian, Thai, and Urdu — and plugs into familiar document and spreadsheet applications.

Product highlights

How It Works

Spelling versus meaning

Words in a name can be translated according to their spelling/pronunciation or their meaning. Consider the following example:

name-translation

Notice the title, “King,” and its placement. In any given language, a name may be native to that language or transliterated from another language. Consider محمود أحمدي نجاد (Mahmoud Ahmadinejad), whose name is native to Arabic, and جورج دبليو بوش (George W. Bush), whose name is not. In each case, Rosette attempts to provide the most logical translation. Thus from Arabic to English, Rosette offers “George Bush,” instead of the transliterated “Jurj Bush.”

Features of the name translator

  • Consistently follows the user-chosen transliteration standard, such as the IC or U.S. Board on Geographic Names for translating from non-Latin scripts to English
  • Distinguishes between when to generate “conventional spellings” of common or well-known names and when to transliterate “unrecognized” names; i.e., those not appearing in any known catalog of foreign names
  • Automatically resolves name spelling ambiguities in the source language, such as partial vocalization of Arabic, or word segmentation in Chinese

Tech Specs

Availability and platform support

Deployment availability:
Plugins:
Bindings:

Supported language pairs

Arabic ↔ English Dari ↔ English Khmer ↔ English Thai ↔ English
Burmese ↦ English Farsi ↔ English Korean ↔ English Urdu ↔ English
Chinese ↔ English Greek ↦ English Korean ↔ Japanese
Chinese ↔ Japanese Hebrew ↦ English Pashto ↔ English
Chinese ↔ Korean Japanese ↦ English Russian ↔ English

Supported writing systems and transliteration standards

Language Script Sample Supported transliteration standards
Arabic Arabic محمد أنور السادات IC, SATTS, BGN, Basis, Buckwalter, and others
Persian (Dari/Farsi) Arabic عذرا جعفری (Dari)
شيرين عبادى (Farsi)
BGN, IC, MELTS
Pashto Arabic حامد کرزی BGN, JDEC-Afghanistan
Urdu Arabic عبد السلام BGN, IC
Burmese Burmese မြန်မာ Folk (Basis), MLCTS
Chinese Hanzi 刘晓波 Hanyu Pinyin, Wade-Giles
Korean Hanja
Hangul
金大中
김대중
BGN, Korda, McCune-Reischauer, Revised Romanization of Korean
Hebrew Hebrew עִברִית ISO 259-2:1994, Folk
(Basis), ICU
Japanese Kanji
Hiragana
Katakana
鈴木章
かづさ
スズキ
Hepburn, Kunrei
Russian Cyrillic Михаи́л Серге́евич Горбачёв BGN, IC
Greek Greek Ἀριστοτέλης ISO 843:1997, ICU
Thai Thai พระพุทธยอดฟ้าจุฬาโลก ICU, ISO :11940-2, ISO 11940-2:2007

Arabic Translation Sample

The following examples illustrate Rosette Name Translator’s ability to translate names between Arabic and English depending upon the name’s language of origin.

Transliteration type Input Output
Person name – Arabic-origin ابو يوسف يعقوب‎‎ Abu-Yusif Ya’qub
Person name – English-origin رذرفورد بي هايز Rutherford B. Hayes
Place name – Arabic-origin باقة الشرقية Baqah al-Sharqiyyah
Organization Acronym – English-origin بي بي سي B.B.C.
Sample output:
{
  "translation": "Mu'ammar Muhammad Abu-Minyar al-Qadhaf",
  "targetLanguage": "eng",
  "targetScript": "Latn",
  "targetScheme": "IC",
  "confidence": 0.06856099342585828
}

Try the Demo


Deployment

Rosette Cloud

Sign up today for a free 30-day trial

The SaaS version of Rosette is rapidly implemented, low maintenance and ideal for users who wish to pay based on monthly call volume. Numerous bindings through a RESTful API are supported.

Rosette Server Edition

This on-premise private cloud deployment puts all the functionality of Rosette Cloud behind your secure firewall, and enables advanced user settings, access to custom profiles (user-specific configuration setups), and deployment of custom models.

Rosette Java Edition

For on-premise systems that need the low-latency, high-speed integration of an SDK, Rosette Java is the way to go. It has been deployed in the most demanding, high-transaction environments, including web search engines, financial compliance, and border security.

Rosette Plugins

Just plug in Rosette for instant high-accuracy multilingual search and fuzzy name search for Elasticsearch or Apache Solr.

Quality documentation and support

Our support team responds to customers in less than a business day, and is committed to a satisfactory resolution. Users have access to in-depth documentation describing all the features, with code examples and a searchable knowledge base.

Visit our GitHub for bindings and documentation.

Questions?

Email: info@basistech.com

Phone: +1-617-386-2000

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