I'm trying to transform texts written in Chinese, Korean, Hebrew, Arabic and other languages with non-latin alphabet to the IPA. For now, I can only think of dictionaries. Are there any other ways? Any software systems/tools?
Moreover, do I need to transform them to an 'intermediate' language eg English or directly to the IPA? I can understand that I may not be able to represent all the sounds of such a language with the English alphabet for obvious reasons.
Thanks a lot
IPA is a representation of sound; therefore "transforming to IPA" implies converting text to sound. That task is harder than it seems, because writing systems are underdetermined – they don't include all the relevant information for pronunciation. You need language-specific knowledge to pronounce things:
Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it's written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.
And even dictionaries aren't enough, since sounds may change in context (British speakers may say fear as /fiə/, but fear of as /fiəɹɒv/).
There are nonetheless attempts at automatically converting text to sound (from which you can derive proper IPA). These are called text-to-speech (TTS) systems. They aren't perfect, but are getting better these days (as you must have noticed if you ever pressed "play" on Google Translate).
Your best bet at converting text from a language into IPA is to look for a) a TTS system for that language, which b) has the option to output as IPA. For example, this is the Mandarin Chinese output of the TTS system espeak in my Linux machine:
$ espeak --ipa -v zh 你好
nˈiɜ xˈɑu2
$ espeak --ipa -v zh 知者樂水，仁者樂山.
ts.ˈi.5 ts.ˈo-2 lˈə5 s.wˈei2
əː1 ts.ˈo-2 lˈə5 s.ˈa5n
Notice that the espeak output has some idiosyncrasies; it marks stress before vowels, but in the case of Chinese this feature is pointless/a bug; it marks so-called "retroflex" (backed) sibilants with a ., rather than IPA /ʂ/ etc.; and it uses pīnyīn tone numbers, rather than IPA tone marks. These could be easily solved in post-processing. More problematic is the fact that TTS isn't perfect, and errors may creep in (/əː1/?). I find it's generally better to try and find TTS systems specifically made for that language, rather than broad ones like espeak.
The English Wiktionary has some Lua infrastructure to do this:
These all have local dependencies and aren't easily portable, but look up "Extension:Scribunto/Lua reference manual" if you want to read more about how to use the Mediawiki Lua module system.
I'll deal with Korean writing. I don't know that there are any tools for directly converting the Korean writing system, hangeul, to IPA, but you can do it in several steps. You'll need some knowledge of Korean phonetics though.
First, you'll have to convert from hangeul syllables to letters. If you're programming in R, you can import the package KoNLP and use the function convertHangulStringToJamos. This will take syllables like 한글 and turn it into individual letters like ㅎㅏㄴㄱㅡㄹ. If you're using Python, there is information about this process here, but I haven't tried it.
Next, you'll need to make some changes to deal with the assimilation rules in Korean: for example, ㅎ+ㄷ/ㄱ/ㅂ/ㅈ -> ㅌ/ㅋ/ㅍ/ㅊ and ㄴ followed by ㄱ -> ㅇ. Thus you will change the above ㅎㅏㄴㄱㅡㄹ to ㅎㅏㅇㄱㅡㄹ.
Then you'll need to convert these to the correct IPA symbols for each one. Korean is fairly phonetic, so this won't be too complicated, but your algorithm will have to take into account whether a consonant is beginning or ending a syllable, and whether a syllable-ending consonant is followed by a vowel, consonant or nothing. You would convert ㅎㅏㅇㄱㅡㄹ to [haŋgɯl].
This process will get you a correct pronunciation almost all of the time. However, there are some words which just aren't pronounced exactly as they are written. For example, the word 효과 is actually pronounced as if "효꽈". You could only get these correct with a dictionary of irregular spellings - however, I have no idea if such a thing exists.
With Hebrew and Arabic it would only work if all the vowel signs are written out. Which normally they are not.
This is partial answer, only for Korean. As Donny Frank mentions in his coment, there is lua module on Wiktionary for Korean: Module:ko-pron. I made python version of it which does not require any additional dependency and just converts hangul into 6 different representations, among which IPA presents. Here is the link to ko-pron on PyPI
