How can I create a string in english letters from another language word?

Question

I need to find a way to rewrite words(translit) from some languages into English language. For example привет (in Russian) sounds like privet (in English).

Meaning and grammar don't matter, but I'd like it to have a more similar sounding. Everything should be in Python, I have diligently looked up on the internet and haven't found a good approach.

For example, something similar to this:

translit("юу со беутифул", "ru") = juu so beutiful

translit("кар", "ru") = kar

Answer 1

Maybe you should give unidecode a try:

>>> import unidecode
>>> unidecode.unidecode("юу со беутифул")
'iuu so beutiful'
>>> unidecode.unidecode("die größten Probleme")
'die grossten Probleme'
>>> unidecode.unidecode("Avec Éloïse, ils président à l'assemblée")
"Avec Eloise, ils president a l'assemblee"

Install it with pip:

pip3 install unidecode

Answer 2

Maybe you are already using it; but you can use transliterate package.

Basic install with pip:

pip install transliterate

Then the code

# coding: utf-8

from transliterate import translit

print translit(u"юу со беутифул", 'ru', reversed=True) # juu so beutiful

WITH CUSTOM CLASS

As @Schmuddi propose, you can create your own custom class to handle german special characters, (works only with python 3.X though).

pip3 install transliterate

Then the code:

# coding: utf-8

from transliterate import translit
from transliterate.base import TranslitLanguagePack, registry

class GermanLanguagePack(TranslitLanguagePack):
    language_code = "de"
    language_name = "Deutsch"

    pre_processor_mapping = {
        u"ß": u"ss",
    }

    mapping = (
        u"ÄÖÜäöü",
        u"AOUaou",
    )

registry.register(GermanLanguagePack)

print(translit(u"Die größten Katzenrassen der Welt", "de")) 
#Die grossten Katzenrassen der Welt

Bonus, the French one:

class FrenchLanguagePack(TranslitLanguagePack):
    language_code = "fr"
    language_name = "French"

    pre_processor_mapping = {
        u"œ": u"oe",
        u"Œ": u"oe",
        u"æ": u"ae",
        u"Æ": "AE"
    }


    mapping = (
        u"àâçéèêëïîôùûüÿÀÂÇÉÈÊËÏÎÔÙÛÜŸ",
        u"aaceeeeiiouuuyAACEEEEIIOUUUY"
    )


registry.register(FrenchLanguagePack)

print(translit(u"Avec Éloïse, ils président à l'assemblée", 'fr'))
#Avec Eloise, ils president a l'assemblee

OTHER POSSIBLE SOLUTION

Since transliterate doesn't cover the german langage (yet?), you can use another package to directly translate sentences: py-translate but it uses google translate so you do need an internet connexion.

Basic install with pip:

pip install py-translate

Then your code:

# coding: utf-8

from translate import translator

print translator('ru', 'en', u"юу со беутифул")
print translator('de', 'en', u"Die größten Katzenrassen der Welt")

Answer 3

Here's an alternative solution to @lenz. But I do like @lenz's suggestion of unidecode better =)

From Python - Replace non-ascii character in string (») and Can somone explain how unicodedata.normalize(form, unistr) work with examples?

To resolve umlauts and accent and graves:

>>> re.sub(r'[^\x00-\x7f]',r'', normalize('NFD', u"Avec Éloïse, ils président à l'assemblée"))
u"Avec Eloise, ils president a l'assemblee"

But it doesn't solve sharp-S character and Cyrillic though:

>>> re.sub(r'[^\x00-\x7f]',r'', normalize('NFD', u"die größten Probleme"))
u'die groten Probleme'

>>> re.sub(r'[^\x00-\x7f]',r'', normalize('NFD', u"юу со беутифул"))
u'  '

Answer 4

This is another possible solution using regex, you can configure this function to replace the special characters for the characters you want:

import re

def remove_accents(string):
    if type(string) is not unicode:
        string = unicode(string, encoding='utf-8')

    string = re.sub(u"[àáâãäå]", 'a', string)
    string = re.sub(u"[èéêë]", 'e', string)
    string = re.sub(u"[ìíîï]", 'i', string)
    string = re.sub(u"[òóôõö]", 'o', string)
    string = re.sub(u"[ùúûü]", 'u', string)
    string = re.sub(u"[ýÿ]", 'y', string)

    return string