Malay Rumi-Jawi Converter

Questions and Answers

What is meant by "conversion"? Is it translation, transliteration, or transcription?

This question could have multiple answers as all three terms could be applicable. Translation, however, is not very precise as it is the script and not the language that is converted—the words are Malay whether they are represented in Rumi or Jawi. Transliteration, the substitution of letters, is better, but the purpose of conversion is to represent the sounds of Malay and not the writing system, so transcription is the most precise term. As an example, the Jawi word ڤلاجر translates to English as student and transcribes to Rumi as pelajar, but might be transliterated as plajr as the Jawi does not encode any vowel between the p and l sounds nor the j and r sounds.

How does the converter work?

The converter essentially performs dictionary lookup: for each word, we consult a mapping of Rumi and Jawi forms and, if the word exists in the mapping, we return the form it maps to. This method makes it quick to find good conversions and easy to improve by correcting mistakes in or adding new words to the dictionary, but has the drawback that it cannot convert any words it does not already have in the dictionary. Please refer to Technical Details for more information.

Why does it not convert some words?

The converter can only convert words it already has in its dictionary. See How does the converter work? above for more information.

Why does it not capitalize some names in Rumi?

All Rumi forms come from a dictionary which only contains the Rumi and Jawi forms and not information such as part-of-speech or whether something is a name. If the Jawi and Rumi are unambiguously a name and it is not capitalized in Rumi, this is most likely an error that should be fixed.

I've found an error, how can I report it?

We appreciate any offers to help. This converter and the dictionary it uses are managed on GitHub. If you have a GitHub account, you can directly report issues with the data (e.g., bad or missing conversions) to the rumi-jawi project, and issues with the site to the rumi-jawi-web project. If you do not have a GitHub account, you may email the maintainer at michaelgoodman@ntu.edu.sg.