write Arabic without an Arabic keyboard

[caybee 21]

This or this will apparently let you convert transliterated Arabic to Arabic. My husband tells me I'll be able to type what I hear and it will come out right. Trouble is I don't hear what he hears - I swear there are consonants where he swears there are none But I put in "fil mish-mish" and sent the result to my husband, and he laughed, so it must work pretty well.

[MrsAmera 41]

Very cool!

[CouscousApplePie 0]

ohhhhhhhhh sweeeett this is pretty cool and handy..... !!!!!

thanks.. this will help when his family is on with me and he wont have to translate yipeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Amana ( KIM)

[caybee 21]

ohhhhhhhhh sweeeett this is pretty cool and handy..... !!!!!

thanks.. this will help when his family is on with me and he wont have to translate yipeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Amana ( KIM)

You may already know this, but just to be clear, it doesn't actually translate Arabic to English and back. There are sites like translate.google.com for that. What it does is allow you to write Arabic in Roman characters (like we're using here) and it will convert it to Arabic characters. So if you write "Salam wa aleikum," it converts it to the Arabic script, but if you write "Hello," it won't translate it to Arabic. So if his family writes something to you in Roman characters, I guess you could use this to convert it to the Arabic script, then copy the Arabic script and paste it into translate.google.com and get the English translation, though that would be a little tedious, and I don't think you'd get a good result trying to translate Darija this way.

Where this is most useful is when my husband posts to Arabic message boards, for example, because in order to write in Arabic script, he calls up a picture of an Arabic keyboard on the screen and clicks each character with the mouse until he has what he wants. It takes a lot of time. This way, he can write in Arabic using Roman characters (the way he chats with his family on MSN, for example) and it will convert to Arabic characters very quickly.

[Bajih 4]

Yes- He picked up on that right away- I wrote in English and it translated it to English only using Arabic letters. It didn't translate the word to

the Arabic word.

It was fun seeing his face the 1st time I sent him a message on it though!! Worth it!

Here is a site that actually translates the English (or other lang) to Arabic- although I think this causes grammar issues- but they have a link where you can submit a better translation. http://www.google.com/language_tools?hl=en

Baj

..one day insha'Allah I will know Arabic....

[Krissy! 0]

Very cool! Maybe I'll use this to compose letters/emails to FIL, abid the grammar errors.

OP: Great pages! It does seem useful if one knows the sounds (I know I 10000% can't use it -- my hearing is shot! )