17

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.

4 Answers 4

25

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.

5
  • 1
    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. Sep 23, 2016 at 9:55
  • 1
    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 3, 2016 at 18:40
  • 2
    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 4, 2016 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, 2019 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, 2020 at 15:53
7

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

3
  • 1
    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 Feb 10, 2018 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, 2019 at 16:19
  • I upvote this, it answers better to the question than the accepted answer.
    – Quidam
    Dec 17, 2019 at 16:20
4

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

1
  • English is free, French, Italian, German and Latin requires a payment.
    – Quidam
    Dec 17, 2019 at 16:23
2

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).

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.