Preferences


From here you are able to change various aspects of how our site works in order to best suit you. Changes automatically when you click any of the options, so there's no separate "save changes" button.

Changes are saved for this session only. To have your changes saved and remembered for the next time you use our site, please login first or register if you don't already have an account.

Transliteration scheme

The transliteration scheme is the method by by which the Thai letters are transcribed to Roman letters, and unfortunately there is no universally accepted system for doing this. The Thai Royal Institute system is the official system and is the method used to transliterate Thai names, place names, road signs etc... However, it makes no distinction between short and long vowels and ignores the tones altogether, so it's not the best system for learners trying to accurately pronounce the words. Many alternatives system try to improve on this, but no one system sounds exactly right to everybody and it can be hard to adapt to a new transliteration scheme if you're used to a different one.

You can set the transliteration scheme that is used on this website to anyone of the following below.

thai2english.com default
The Thai Royal Institute system.
The International Phonetic Alphabet
As used in 'Thai for Beginners' and other Paiboon publishing books
As used in 'Teach Yourself Thai' by David Smyth
As used in the Lonely Planet guidebook and phrasebook.
Don't show transliteration at all

Tone markers

By default, we'll show the transliteration for Thai words with a tone mark symbol above the vowel in each transliterated syllable to indicate which tone it's pronounced with. If your computer has problems displaying these characters or you don't want them, they can be turned off below.

  Example
Show transliteration with tone marks sà-wàt-dee kráp sà-baai dee măi
Show transliteration without tone marks sa-wat-dee krap sa-baai dee mai

Spacing

Thai text is entered without any spaces between the words, which makes reading it an additional challenge for learners. When entering text into the home page, we automatically spaces between the Thai words to make doing a manual translation easier. If you prefer, this can be turned off and the text left as it was entered.

  Example
Add spaces between Thai words ใน น้ำ มี ปลา ใน นา มี ข้าว
Don't add any spaces, leave the Thai script as it was entered ในน้ำมีปลา ในนามีข้าว