Italian Pronunciation Generator. IPA Transcription Translator (2024)

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How to use this Italian IPA translator and pronunciation generator

Introduction

This phonetic translator will help you obtain very accurate phonetic transcription of your Italian text.

It uses the symbols of International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) — the most popular phonetic transcription system in the world.

Here how this tool works:

First, the algorithm attempts to find the word or its main form in our database which contains 85,000 Italian words.

For each Italian word the database contains the following information:

1. the stress position in the word,
2. if the word has a letter e, whether it is an open /ɛ/ or a closed /e/,
3. if the word has a letter o, whether it is an open /ɔ/ or a closed /o/,
4. if the word has a letter s, whether it is voiced or unvoiced.

By the way you need to know all this information in order to pronounce Italian words correctly.

On the next step, the algorithm applies a complex set of pronunciation rules to convert the word to phonetic transcription.

Finally, the algorithm looks at the surrounding words and updates the phonetic transcription accordingly.

If you need to copy the phonetic transcription into another program or print it, please read our FAQ.

Watch a tutorial "How to convert text to phonetic transcription and listen to audio recordings of words"

High-quality computer-generated audio

You can easily create audio for your text using this pronunciation generator. Listen to the voice samples below.

Text-to-speech service is provided by the following companies:

• Google
• Amazon
• Microsoft

Each time you generate an audio, we have to pay one of these companies.

Text-to-speech service is only available with the subscription Premium.

Multiple pronunciations of Italian words

Some Italian words are spelled the same, but are pronounced differently and have different meanings. They are called hom*ographs. Compare:

The phonetic translator will highlight hom*ographs in green. If you hover your cursor over these words or tap them on your mobile device, you will see all possible pronunciations.

At the moment this phonetic translator cannot yet decide which pronunciation is correct for such words. You will need to choose the correct pronunciation yourself depending on the context.

Translation to your native language

This pronunciation generator allows you to obtain an automatic translation of your text to your native language.

Automatic translation service is provided by a third-party company (Google). Each time you translate text into another language, we have to pay Google a small fee.

Translation service is only available with the subscription Premium.

Create your own custom word lists

You can create your own custom word lists using this phonetic translator. Here's how you can do it:

1. For the setting Transcription display options select the option "transcription above each word".
2. In the section Choose what you will see when you click the word turn on the option " to word list".
3. After submitting your text, click on the word you want to add to the word list and then click the button " to word list".
4. You will be prompted to select the transcription and enter the meaning/translation of the word (the latter for most languages is optional).
5. Once you finished adding words to your word list, click on My Account at the top of the page and then on My word lists. You will see the list of all your word lists.

There are so many things you can do with your word list:

1. export it to a file (Word, Excel, plain text),
2. print it from your browser,
3. share it with other people (for example, your students),
4. practice pronunciation of every word using the audio recordings of real people (if available) or high-quality text-to-speech voices.

Watch a tutorial "How to create custom word lists"

Broad and narrow transcription

This phonetic translator can show both broad (phonemic) and narrow transcriptions. If you need phonemic transcription, please uncheck the following settings in the section Advanced options:

• Display allophones for the phonemes /m/ and /n/

Highlighting of high-frequency Italian words

In the section Advanced options you will find a special option that allows you to highlight high-frequency Italian words. The words from different frequency intervals will be highlighted in the following colors:

If you want to make the frequency analysis of your text and obtain the detailed statistics, please use Italian word frequency counter.

Learning Italian as second language: phonetic transcription can help you improve your Italian pronunciation

Italian pronunciation is relatively simple compared to other languages. The pronunciation rules in the Italian language are quite strict.

However, there are several caveats which we mentioned in the introduction. As a reminder, those are:

1. the stress position in the word,
2. the open /ɛ/ and closed /e/ sounds,
3. the open /ɔ/ and closed /o/ sounds,
4. the voiced or unvoiced /s/ sound.

This tool will serve you as an Italian pronunciation guide and will help you save time. You will no longer need to look up the pronunciation of words in a dictionary.

If you use the phonetic transcription regularly in combination with Italian audio and video recordings, your pronunciation and listening skills in the Italian language will improve.

Italian pronunciation dictionaries that we recommend

Some of the dictionaries listed below are not really pronunciation dictionaries, but just regular Italian dictionaries. However we used all of them extensively when we were proofreading our database with pronunciations of Italian words.

• Nuovo Devoto-Oli
• lo Zingarelli 2022
• Dizionario di pronuncia italiana

Check our Italian phonetic subtitle converter and obtain something like this:

Greetings from the developer Timur

Find out how to activate your brain and learn faster (4 min.)

Timur Baytukalov. A Complete Guide to Language Learning. Part 1: Learning Pronunciation

Free Webinar "Phonetic transcription for fast language learning" (20 min.)

To develop this translator, we used information from different sources mentioned on this page. The phonetic transcription was taken from these sources in accordance with the Copyright Act of Canada (Paragraph 29, Fair Dealing for the purpose of education).