You Can Now Translate Roman Urdu to English Using Google!

Google’s magical little search box is much more than just a way to check if the internet is working or not. You can use it to perform calculations, check currency rates, and translate texts as well, be it in the normal Urdu script or even when written in Roman Urdu.

Google Translate has been around for quite a while, letting you translate texts from one language to another. It supports over a hundred languages, including Urdu.

However, the lack of Urdu-script keyboards somewhat curtails our ability to translate a piece of text from Urdu to English or from Urdu to any other language.

Fortunately, there is a nifty little trick that you can use to get Google to translate Roman Urdu— Urdu words written using English alphabets— in English, or any other language you want to.

Apparently, Google has trained its search algorithm to detect Hindi words written in Roman English. Since a lot of words between the two languages are similar, you can use it for Urdu as well. I have tried it out and it worked great for the most part, and almost all of the words I tried to translate gave me a correct result.

Here is how you can do it.

Translate Roman Urdu to English

Simply type the Urdu word you want to translate to English, followed by “in English”. However, this seldom works. If this doesn’t work for you, head over to the next point.

translate-1

You can also achieve the same results with “Translate Hindi to English” term on Google. It will quickly pull up a nice Google Translate box right inside the search results. Write a word in the first box and it will translate it as best as it can for you in the next box.

translate-2

It should be mentioned here that Google should incorporate the same functionality for Urdu as well and not just Hindi as it does here. But given how most phrases in Urdu and Hindi sound the same, it works for most common phrases used in the subcontinent. Knowing Google, it may only be a matter of time before it does so.

It also works inside Google’s mobile app:

translate-3

Google was excellent at detecting single words but messed up when translating sentences, or even a couple of words.

Nonetheless, it is definitely impressive. It is also one of the best solutions I have found to quickly translating an Urdu word to English without having to search for the word written in Urdu script.


  • Actually the service is pretty shitty. Tried it already. Its not something new. Google has been able to do that for quite sometime now. However, Google can just translate basic words like tumhain become you but in sentence, even for short sentence, Google can’t make any sense of what we write so this service is definitely a no no.

  • feel sorry for the author who can’t differentiate between hindhi and urdu.
    title says Roman urdu and every snapshot tells a different story(hindhi)

  • Roman Urdu/Hindi main sab log apni alag alag spellings use karte hain, us main koi rules and regulations tu hai nahi. So how would Google deal that?

    For example, following are few spell variations.
    Jadoo, Jaadoo, Jaado
    Kaise, Kaisay, Kesey
    Neechay, Nechay


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