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Aramaic and Arabic languages are close relatives of Hebrew. It were easy for Israelis to study these languages, but the differences in the writing systems makes this task more difficult. ע\ع (Ayn\Ayn) Converter is a Firefox add-on, designed initially as a transliteration tool that converts Arabic/Syriac texts (vocalized or not) available on the Net, to Hebrew writing system, and gives to a Hebrew reader ability to read these texts (and understand them partially, even w/o learning of the languages).
Disclaimer
Remember, that this converter, w/o any doubt, contains bugs, especially the early versions, and the documentation, probably, contains mistakes. Also, remember, that I've written it on early stage of my learning of the languages for my own convenience. I hope, it'll be useful for you too, but you can not relay on it too much. Install the extension from the Mozilla site.To use the converter, select, with the mouse, Arabic/Syriac text in your browser window then use the context menu, to get the transliteration and the translation. To get the translation select one or several words (or a word part). Some from the supported translation services require that no more than one word should be selected. Others accept short phrases too. To use this add-on with a PDF-file, the file should contain actual text, but not pictures of the text. In this case, it is necessary to open the file (or the URL) with Zoho Viewer. ע\ع knows to work with Google Docs Viewer, but this viewer itself has a bug with RTL text selection.
Principles of the Transliteration
The transliteration model is selected to make the Arabic words easy recognizable for a Hebrew reader.
In the Hebrew, letters בגדכפת
have (or had) two variants of pronunciation : plosive and
fricative.
Dagesh Qal is used to denote a plosive variant.
Lesser known upperscore line -- Rafe, may be used to denote a fricative one.
The converter uses both these signs.
In modern Israeli Hebrew only כ and פ still have each two pronunciations, but in the Liturgical Mizrahi Hebrew all בכפת letters
have two pronunciations, and this converter assumes the Mizrahi Hebrew pronunciation
for the Arabic to Hebrew transliteration.
In the Arabic, פ always sounds as F, and ב is always B, but the letters דטכצת denote each two sounds (actually, there are two distinct letters: ﻙ transliterated as כּ and ﺥ mapped to כֿ
; for other sound pairs Arabic uses the letter variations as the Hebrew does
).
With the Dagesh (and w/o Rafe) דטכת denote the same sounds as in modern Israeli Hebrew, but צּ denotes a specific
consonant ض DAD
that is the plosive variation of the tsade, but sounds closer to D(in the Hebrew צ is always an affricative). For example, أرض
-- Arabic word meaning "earth" , written with DAD, will be transliterated as ארץּ and, therefore, easily recognized.
With the Rafe (and w/o Dagesh) דטת letters denote:
The letter ر\ר denotes itself, in Arabic, a trill sound close to the Amharic/Russian R. This sound is very difficult for most ashkenazi jews to pronounce, and local helpers of nazis in the Eastern Europe used a russian word "KUKURUZA"/"кукуруза" as a shibboleth to recognize the jews for the extermination. The letter and the diacritic sign ء HAMZA denotes a glottal stop while alif w/o HAMZA denotes mostly a long /a:/ vowel. In the Hebrew, א denotes a mandatory glottal stop when the alef has a shva niqqud אְ, or when the letter just before the alef has a shva . The converter treats HAMZA as a mandatory stop, and puts alef with shva there, but omits the leading אְ. For example إِسْرَائِيل will be transliterated as אִסְרָאְיִיל . The shva in the converted Arabic text should never be pronounced, as sukun (سكون) it denotes absence of vowel. Kamatz denotes long /a:/ in the converted Arabic and Eastern Syriac texts, but /o/ in the converted Western Syriac. | ||||||||
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To read Syriac, and use the Syriac dictionary you need install East Syriac Adiabene and Serto Kharput fonts from the Beth Mardutho font collection. | ||||||||
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Useful external links
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Install 
Principles of the Transliteration External links Syriac Fonts Dictionaries |