Protea is an open source tool built by Gal Abramovitz as a course assignment in a Digital Humanities course given by Dr. Yael Netzer, for the DiJeSt project. The tool enables simple transliteration from script to script by inserting a text and a table of transliteration pairs – that can be edited dynamically to fit particular texts and transliteration schemes. Our team members – prepared such transliteration tables that can be used and adapted:
For example, having digitized a Ladino newspaper with our open DiJeSt model in Transkribus, you can copy the text and paste it or upload it in the upper right pane in Protea. In the dictionary window, you can upload this transliteration table, prepared for you by Matan Stein, and see the text in Latin letters in the bottom right pane. You can then adapt the dictionary as necessary until it provides the transliteration that suits your needs.
In this folder you can also find transliteration prepared by Dmitry Toperman for Soviet Yiddish and one to use for YIVO transliteration, and a table prepared by Nadia Serba for transliteration of Judeo Arabic to Arabic script.
It is important to remember that Protea is not meant to provide a scientific tranliteration, nor reconstruct any authentic pronunciation: it merely helps you to approximate transliteration to a level that will suffice to assist with understanding, or better yet, to help with the study of the Original script.
Finally, we recommend taking a minute to consult Protea documentation on its landing page, in order to learn how best to edit the dictionary.
