I read a few papers about machine translation but did not understand them well.
The language models (in Google translate) use phonetics and machine learning as best as I can tell.
My question then becomes is it possible to convert an Arabic word that is phonetically spelled in English to translate the users intended Arabic word?
For instance the word 'Hadith' is an English phonetic of the Arabic word 'حديث'. Can I programmatically go from 'Hadith' to Arabic?
Thanks the Wiki article, there's an entire field of work in the area of Transliteration. There was a Google API for this that was deprecated in 2011 and moved to the Google Input Tools service.
The simplest answer is Buck Walter Transliteration but at first glace a 1:1 mapping doesn't seem like a good enough idea.
I am going to try to see if there's a way to hack the Google Input tools and call it even at CLI level because their online demo works very well