tetrak-translit

Detect, transliterate and fold Armenian text. A dependency-free Python library and command-line tool for the problem every Armenian catalogue has: the same name exists in Armenian script in two orthographies and in four or five Latin spellings, and no stock search engine treats them as one word.

Status: alpha. The tables and the fold are tested against the set in tests/data/fold_cases.tsv; what is not in that set is not claimed. See known gaps.

pip install tetrak-translit

>>> import tetrak_translit as tt
>>> tt.detect("Երեւան").orthography
'classical'
>>> tt.transliterate("Երևան", "ala_lc")
'Erevan'
>>> tt.transliterate("Երևան", "bgn_pcgn")
'Yerevan'
>>> tt.transliterate("Յակոբ", "western")
'Hagop'
>>> tt.fold("Yerevan") == tt.fold("Երեւան") == tt.fold("Erewan")
True
>>> tt.fold("Boghossian") == tt.fold("Պօղոսեան") == tt.fold("Poghosyan")
True

$ tetrak-translit detect "Ազգ եւ հայրենիք"
armenian (classical)	Ազգ եւ հայրենիք
$ tetrak-translit transliterate --scheme iso_9985 "Չարենց"
Čarenc'
$ tetrak-translit transliterate --scheme iso_9985 --to armenian "Čarenc'"
Չարենց
$ cut -f2 titles.tsv | tetrak-translit fold

Three jobs

Detection. Which script a string is in and, for Armenian, which orthography: classical (everything printed before the 1922 reform, and the diaspora still), reformed (Soviet and post-Soviet Armenia) or indeterminate (the string reads the same under both). Character ranges plus a few orthographic tells, chiefly a free ւ outside the ու digraph.

Transliteration, between Armenian and five named Latin schemes, each a versioned, tested table written from its published standard:

Reversible where the standard is one-to-one; the others are documented as lossy and the library refuses to guess rather than reverse them.

The canonical fold. One function that maps any of the above, Armenian or Latin, onto a single index form, so that index-time and query-time normalisation agree. This is what a Solr or Elasticsearch analysis chain calls. It generalises the script fold in Tetrak's Armenian recogniser and takes the orthography findings of Tetrak brief 014 as its first test cases.

The schemes are for display; the fold is for finding. A fold key is a deliberately coarse ASCII skeleton (poghosian, kevork, haiastan) and must never be shown to a reader. Cross-script name-matching research (LREC 2020) finds there is often no gold form to score against, and this package does not pretend there is one.

What it does not do

• Translate. Transliteration is the same words in different letters.
• Guess at lossy reversals. transliterate(..., to="armenian") works for ISO 9985 and Hübschmann-Meillet and raises for the rest.
• Fold every popular spelling. Spellings that insert an unwritten schwa (Megerdich for Մկրտիչ) or come through Russian (Khachaturian for Խաչատրյան) do not fold to the Armenian, and a classical աւ that reformed spelling turned into օ does not either. The test set is the claim.

Documentation

The user guide and API reference are at scattercode.github.io/tetrak-translit, built from the released code at each release.

Where it comes from

Built as part of Tetrak, a local-first OCR pipeline for archival material, for two users at once: an Armenian cultural heritage aggregator that has to match catalogue records across scripts, and Tetrak's own Armenian transcripts, where an ALA-LC rendering beside the OCR output is both a catalogue-ready field and an accessibility one (a screen reader with no Armenian voice can at least read the romanisation).

Contributing and licence

See CONTRIBUTING.md for the checks, the commit style and the release automation, and SECURITY.md for reporting a vulnerability. MIT licensed — see LICENSE.