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I'm looking for a website or software that will take text written in a source language and produce a transcription in IPA. The languages I am interested in are French, Italian and German, but if you know resources for other languages I would be happy to know.

For example, English Phonetic Transcription does English - IPA for free. Here's a sample of their transcription.

All that glitters is not gold.

ɒl ðæt glɪtərz ɪz nɑt gold.

I'm looking for a tool like this. If you're wondering why one would need such a tool, besides the obvious application of helping people learning a new language, it's also useful to singers/actors who have to perform in a foreign language.

Community
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Robin
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4 Answers4

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The open source eSpeak program can do this:

espeak -v lang --ipa "text goes here"

where lang is:

  • fr for French
  • it for Italian
  • de for German

It is not 100% accurate in pronunciation in all cases, but will speak out the pronunciations.

You can also use Kirshenbaum-like ASCII IPA:

espeak -v lang --ipa "[[orthographic text you want transcribed to IPA goes here]]"

If you use -x instead of --ipa you get the phonemes in the format that espeak accepts.

Owen_AR
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reece
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    espeak supports a number of other languages (see espeak --voices), but one should be aware that not all can be considered as reliable, according to the documentation. – Skippy le Grand Gourou Sep 23 '16 at 09:55
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    Why is this the accepted answer? You asked for a program to go from audio to IPA transcription. This goes from text to audio, and the text is not IPA. – WGroleau Dec 03 '16 at 18:40
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    The question is asking for text in the source language (not audio) to IPA, which is what this does. The --ipa option prints out the IPA transcription of what is being spoken. You can use -q if you don't want the audio and just want the IPA. – reece Dec 04 '16 at 17:58
  • It doesn't answer the question, it doesn't produce a transcription in IPA, like "English Phonetic Transcription" does. – Quidam Dec 17 '19 at 16:17
  • Quidam: How so? espeak -v en --ipa "foot strut" results in fˈʊt stɹˈʌt which is valid IPA. It looks like "English Phonetic Transcription" is using US English (-v en-us), so that would produce ˈɔːl ðæt ɡlˈɪɾɚz ɪz nˌɑːt ɡˈoʊld. The differences then are either accent specific, quality differences (e.g. t vs ɾ, i.e. a "tapped T"), or transcription variants (e.g. ər vs ɚ). If you want an exact match you would need to modify the espeak phonemes or use sed (or other find/replace tool) to modify the phonemes to how you want them transcribed. – reece Jan 25 '20 at 15:53
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I happend to find this: EasyPronunciation.com

Works okay for French, but it goofs up on some words, so watch out. Looks like English, Spanish and Chinese are also available there.

Here's something for German: Donnerstag

Ken Graham
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Matt
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    I was using this site but it limits the amount of transcriptions for some reason. I did not know it goofs up on some words, thanks for the heads up – Gui Imamura Feb 10 '18 at 19:01
  • @GuiImamura Not "for some reason", it's a premium service. If you aren't registered, you can submit a text per hour, it also limits the maximum size of the text. – Quidam Dec 17 '19 at 16:19
  • I upvote this, it answers better to the question than the accepted answer. – Quidam Dec 17 '19 at 16:20
4

Have you tried IPANow? It does IPA transcriptions for Latin, Italian, German, and French.

Otavio Macedo
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Languages: English, Español, Français, Português, 日本語, 中文, Русский

No Italian or German IPA

Languages: Danish, English, German.

  • For Italian:

-> You can use Wordreference.com, for instance: https://www.wordreference.com/iten/ampio: > [ˈampjo]

It should give IPA for the language in which it translates, so probably (needs to be checked one by one, I didn't.):
Español, Français, Italiano, Português, Català, Deutsch, Svenska, Nederlands, Русский, Polski, Română, Čeština, Ελληνικά, Türkçe, 英汉词典, 英和辞書,영-한 사전 قاموس إنجليزي , عربي

-> EasyPronounciation.com added Italian (you need to register to bypass the hourly limit, it's only one text per hour.), so, it has now:

German (with or without stress), English, Cantonese, Chinese, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Persan, Russian (with or without stress).

-> https://www.ipasource.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=italian&order=relevance&dir=desc
It gives transcription of texts, but you cannot submit your own one in the free version.

It has English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Latin, and maybe a few other ones.

  • For all languages,
    You can also use the Wiktionary, it's often accurate (most of the time).
Quidam
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  • Note, that tophonetics.com only does English transcription, the languages listed only concern an interface of the website. – hellpanderr Dec 18 '23 at 16:49