Tibetan Translation Tool – Easy Installation Guide

Tibetan Translation Tool – Easy Installation Guide

The Tibetan Himalayan Library of the University of Virginia offers a very helpful tool for translating from Tibetan to English. There is both an online version and a version that is locally installable.

Installation

  • Online usage without installation on your computer: The online version is available from http://www.thlib.org/reference/translation-tool/. To use it, you simply need to go to that page, enter a bunch of Tibetan by using Wylie transliteration and click Translate. If you want to see the result in Tibetan script then you need to install a special font (called Tibetan Machine Web) on your computer first (see the step “Download the Tibetan font” below). Otherwise, you have to select that the output should be in Roman script and you will then see the result in Wylie.
  • Installation on your computer: This dictionary can be installed on Windows, MacOS and Linux. In order to install the program on your computer you need to do the following:
    1. Download Java from www.java.com and install it. If you know that you already have Java 1.4 or later installed you can skip this step.
    2. Dowload the Tibetan font, open the Zip file and copy all the individual files from the Zip file into the font folder of your system. (For Windows the font folder can be reached through the control panel – more details on how to install a font in Windows can be found in the article Installing Fonts on Windows. For MacOS, a font is installed by clicking it and then choosing Install Font when a preview of the font is shown; this needs to be repeated for each of the ten font files in the zip file.)
    3. Download the translation tool together with the standard dictionaries, and unpack the zip file into a folder of your choice. After that, the program is run by going into that folder and opening the file DictionarySearchStandalone.jar. Whenever you want to run the program in the future you need to go to this folder and open DictionarySearchStandalone.jar.  Note that you MUST NOT move the dictionary files to a different location at a later time after you have started to use the program!
    4. When you start the program for the first time it will ask you which dictionary to use. You need to select the option access local dictionary and then use the Browse button to select the standard dictionary (free.wrd) from the folder into which you had just unzipped the translation tool.