Efraim Feinstein is the inventor (and maintainer) of this transliteration engine. Here is a direct link to the Open Siddur Project’s transliterator (outside of the iframe in which it is embedded above).

For an alternate tool, try Charles Loder’s Hebrew Transliteration App.

Romanization schemas

There is no single standard for Hebrew transliteration. In our demo you can transliterate Hebrew text in eight different ways originally set out in the following sources:

• Rules of Transcription from Hebrew Script to Latin Script (Academy of the Hebrew Language, 2007)
• International Phonetic Alphabet (2005, as used by Wikipedia)
• The SBL Handbook of Style (Society of Biblical Literature, 1999)
• Romanization Table for Hebrew and Yiddish (The American Library Association/Library of Congress, 1997)
• Concise Dictionary of the Words in the Hebrew Bible with their Renderings (James Strong, 1890)
• Coding for Transliteration of Hebrew (Michigan-Claremont, 1984)
• An approximation of Modern Israeli Hebrew pronunciation by Open Siddur lead developer, Efraim Feinstein (2010)
• An approximation of Modern Ashkenazi Hebrew pronunciation by Aharon Varady (2010)

Currently, the demonstration only provides romanization — the transliteration of Hebrew to a Latin script. By incorporating additional transliteration standards for additional scripts, we will be able to convert Hebrew to Greek, Cyrillic, Amharic, etc. (and vice versa). The tables are not fixed, and we can change them if bugs are found or better ways are suggested. Eventually, we will be implementing a table editor to allow editing the tables, creating, and of course, sharing new ones. For now, if you would like to add a transliteration standard to our database, take a look first at these examples.

License

The source code for this romanizing transliterator is open-source, LGPL 3.0.