While many of these sites have character or word limits, most don’t cost a penny and support a variety of languages. Free online tools and services put translation help right at your fingertips. Translation Websitesįew things are more deflating in family history research than finally finding a document potentially full of clues about an ancestor, only to discover it’s written in an unfamiliar language or alphabet.įortunately, with today’s technology and the vast reach of the Internet, you don’t have to get lost in translation. Be sure to click on his About this Website and How to Use It link to learn more about these tools. There’s also a Virtual Keyboard for typing characters of any Latin-based alphabet in one step-simply use the keyboard displayed on the screen to click the characters you want to type, then copy and paste the text into your application. This is helpful, for example, if you need to sound out names from vital records or tombstones in the Russian alphabet, in order to match them to names in the English alphabet. A tool for “Dealing with Characters in Foreign Alphabets” covers Arabic, Russian, Greek, Hebrew, and Japanese (Hiragana and Katakana) alphabets. The site provides transliteration tools to help you go from one alphabet to another, including Arabic to English, English to Russian, Greek to English and many more. One-Step Webpages: Steve Morse’s collection of One-Step genealogy tools has some extremely useful language helps. Transliterations also are helpful when you’re making research notes and your word processing software doesn’t offer fonts with characters in the language of interest. Our ancestors often would transliterate their names so Americans could spell and pronounce them, producing many variant spellings. For genealogists, transliteration comes into play when you’re researching people and places that use non-Roman alphabets, such as Hebrew, Cyrillic or Greek, and name changes of immigrants from those places. Transliteration isn’t always an exact science-as with the above example, sometimes words can be transliterated more than one way. In Spanish, the transliteration is Janucá or Jánuka. The English transliteration of the Hebrew word is Hanukkah or Chanukah. Family Tree Templates and Relationship Chartsįor example, this is the Hebrew word for the Festival of Lights holiday: חנוכה.Best Genealogy Websites for Asia and the Pacific.Best Geography and Historical Map Websites.Best African American Genealogy Websites.Best US and Canadian Genealogy Websites.Surnames: Family Search Tips and Surname Origins.Preserving Old Photos of Your Family History.How to Find Your Ancestor’s US Military Records.
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