What is transliteration?

Transliteration maps the letters of one script onto the closest letters of another, so the result can be read aloud roughly the same way. It is different from translation, which conveys meaning rather than sound.

Which scripts are supported?

This tool covers Russian Cyrillic, modern Greek, and Eastern Armenian using widely used romanisation conventions. Each script has its own letter-by-letter mapping table applied in order from longest match to shortest.

Is the romanisation standardised?

It follows common practical romanisation close to ISO and BGN/PCGN conventions, favouring readable Latin output. Official documents may require a specific standard, so always check the rules for passports or legal use.

Why do some letters map to two Latin letters?

Single characters in Cyrillic or Greek often represent sounds that need a digraph in Latin, such as the Cyrillic ch, sh, and ya, or the Greek theta and chi. The table emits multiple Latin letters where one would lose the sound.

What is the Latin Transliterator?

Transliterate text from Cyrillic, Greek, and Armenian scripts into the Latin alphabet using standard romanisation tables. Useful for names, place names, and search. Runs entirely in your browser. It runs free in your browser on Gera Tools, with nothing uploaded.

Latin Transliterator

Name: Latin Transliterator
Creator: Gera Tools
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Transliteration converts text from one writing system into another letter by letter, preserving roughly how it sounds. This tool romanises Cyrillic, Greek, and Armenian text into the Latin alphabet using standard mapping tables.

How it works

Each script has a lookup table mapping its characters to Latin equivalents. The text is scanned and every character is replaced with its mapped value:

Cyrillic:  ш → sh,  ч → ch,  я → ya,  ж → zh
Greek:     θ → th,  χ → ch,  ψ → ps,  ω → o
Armenian:  ղ → gh,  ճ → ch,  ջ → j,   ո → o

Multi-letter sounds are emitted as digraphs so the romanised form can be pronounced. Characters with no mapping — spaces, digits, existing Latin letters, punctuation — pass through unchanged.

Why each script behaves differently

Each of the three supported scripts has its own quirks when romanised, and it is worth knowing what to expect:

Russian Cyrillic is the most commonly romanised script in everyday use — for passports, street signs, search queries, and transliterated names in English-language documents. The main challenge is that Cyrillic has no direct Latin equivalent for sounds like щ (shch), ъ (a “hard sign” that modifies the preceding consonant), or the soft sign ь. This tool maps щ → shch and passes soft/hard signs through as apostrophes or omits them, following BGN/PCGN-inspired conventions.

Modern Greek is close to a one-to-one mapping for most letters, but several common digraphs need care: αυ and ευ shift pronunciation depending on what follows, though a simple character-by-character table treats them as a+u and e+u. The output is phonetically approximate rather than linguistically rigorous.

Eastern Armenian (Արևելահայ) uses an alphabet of 38 letters and has a well-established Latin romanisation tradition. Because Western and Eastern Armenian have different phonetic values for some letters, this tool targets the Eastern variety (used in Armenia itself) rather than the Western variety (used in the diaspora).

Practical worked examples

A few conversions that illustrate what the tool produces:

Source	Script	Latin output
Москва	Cyrillic	Moskva
Αθήνα	Greek	Athina
Երևան	Armenian	Yerevan
Санкт-Петербург	Cyrillic	Sankt-Peterburg
Θεσσαλονίκη	Greek	Thessaloniki

When to use this (and its limits)

Transliteration is one-directional and lossy: multiple source letters can map to the same Latin string, so the conversion cannot always be reversed without ambiguity. That is fine for the most common uses — romanising a name for a spreadsheet, making a place name searchable in a Latin-alphabet system, or adapting a username — but it is not suitable for cases where the exact original spelling matters.

For official documents (passports, visa applications, legal names), national standards apply and they vary. Russia’s GOST-7.79, the UN’s romanisation tables, and ICAO passport rules do not all agree. Always verify the required standard for your jurisdiction before relying on any tool’s output for legal purposes.