📘 Dictionaries and translation tools

Monlam AI https://monlam.ai/ does a fabulous job and now is easy to access online and as an app. It includes translation of words or full sentences to and from English, text-to-speech, speech-to-text, as well as an OCR tool.

The Phurba app is the most comprehensive and useful resource for contemporary Tibetan words, where I often find things that I can't get anywhere else...

1. 84,000 Glossary https://84000.co/glossary-search has Tibetan and Sanskrit. Not the easiest to navigate or find sources, but has a lot there. Would be great if it were laid out more like Dharmapedia.

2. Bing translation tool - fairly ok for translating modern Tibetan to English. For example, news articles. It’s a bit of a slog though, for now. Still fairly young. It is handy for translating the full entries from Tibetan Terminology, too.
   https://www.bing.com/translator 

3. BDRC article on Tibetan alphabetical order https://www.bdrc.io/blog/2022/03/30/sorting-out-tibetan-alphabetical-order/?lang=bo 

4. Buddhist Translators Workbench at Mangalam Research Center in Berkeley, California, USA https://www.mangalamresearch.org/buddhist-translators-workbench/ 

5. Christian Steinert Dictionary - Tib-Eng, Eng-Tib (switch between languages using the toggle icon next to the settings wheel).  Searches can be done either in Tibetan characters or in Wylie, as well as English terms. Better for dharma vocabulary than contemporary, but it has some modern terms.  I've just had another look at this in 2026 and I see that a lot of new sources have been added, including vocabulary from Franziska Oertle's Anki deck.  It's becoming more and more useful so I'm adding it back into my rotation. I mainly use Phurba-ka-kha-ga and Monlam. Now this will be my third  go-to stop. I might  even move it to first place for single words, because it lets me copy-paste directly,  whereas  Phurba doesn't.
   https://dictionary.christian-steinert.de/#home 

6. Dharma Dictionary - Rangjung Yeshe Tibetan-English Dictionary, Dharma Glossaries and Resources https://rywiki.tsadra.org/index.php/Main_Page 

7. Dharmapedia - great if you speak French, but even if you don't, you can use a browser extension like Google Translate to give you a good approximation for this encyclopedia of Buddhist terms. 

https://www.dharmapedia.fr/ 

Ebook version

8. English-Tibetan Modern Science Dictionary from the Emory Tibet Science Initiative https://www.emorytibetscienceinitiative.com 

9. ♀️♂️ Gender-inclusive terms https://tibetanequalityproject.org/blog/gender-inclusive-tibetan-terms-for-family-and-friends 

10. Glosbe
    https://glosbe.com/bo/en 

11. Goldstein English-Tibetan Dictionary -
    https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520051577/english-tibetan-dictionary-of-modern-tibetan or https://web.archive.org/web/20220120141213/https://case.edu/affil/tibet/documents/English-TibetanDictionaryofModernTibet_001.pdf 

12. Goldstein Tibetan-English Dictionary -
    https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520204379/the-new-tibetan-english-dictionary-of-modern-tibetan 

13. Google Translate https://translate.google.ca/ Google has recently added Tibetan to their public interface. I tried a few sentences (September 2024) and it seems pretty ok. Use it with a grain of salt, as with Bing.

14. How to navigate a dictionary with Tibetan word order
    Dictionary Order | Classical Tibetan Wiki (learntibetanlanguage.org

15. IMTranslator - create interlinear translations (see the article explaining the process here)

16. Lexilogos - list of dictionaries
    https://www.lexilogos.com/english/tibetan_dictionary.htm 

17. Monlam - Artificial Intelligence - does a fabulous job and now is easy to access online and as an app. It includes translation of words or full sentences to and from English, text-to-speech, speech-to-text, as well as an OCR tool. I will be test driving it a lot more from now on and will report back on how best to use it.
    https://monlam.ai/ 

18. Monlam Dictionary - This site is powerful, and lets you choose between Tibetan-Tibetan, Tibetan-English, English-Tibetan and Tibetan-Sanskrit.
    https://monlamdic.com/ 

19. Monlam Elementary Dictionary app https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.monlam.el_dictionary&hl=en_CA 

20. Phurba (ka-kha-ga) Tibetan dictionary app - This app is very extensive and useful for Modern Tibetan in particular. I end up using THL more if I am trying to break a sentence into words or focusing on dharma words. Note that Tibetan searches must be done in Tibetan characters, not in Wylie, so you will also need to install a Tibetan keyboard. It will search for English terms if you type in English.

    1. ios: https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/tibetan-dictionary/id418873951

    2. Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.phurba.tibetandictionary&hl=en_US 

    3. Desktop/laptop: if you want to be able to search in the dictionary using the full-sized keyboard on your home computer (the phone keyboard is quite small...), you can install an emulator like Bluestacks. I have tried it and it seems to work well. It speeds up my translation process...

21. Rigpa Shedra Wiki - an online encyclopedia of Tibetan Buddhism https://www.rigpawiki.org/index.php?title=Main_Page 

22. Tibetan-English Visual Dictionary https://www.scribd.com/document/656559282/Tibetan-English-Visual-Dictionary 

23. THL Tib-Eng Translation Tool - The Tibetan and Himalayan Library. You can paste in whole Tibetan sentences, and it will break it into words, but it will occasionally guess wrong and you will need to do a bit of syllable investigation.  
    https://www.thlib.org/reference/dictionaries/tibetan-dictionary/translate.php 

24. Tibetan Oral History Archive Project at the Library of Congress
    Glossary and Audio recordings of interviews

25. Tibetan reading and translation resources list https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XoqD88xcIcLh2ojqR2TJI3JjLBqpubrj/view 

26. Tibetan-Sanskrit-English Dictionary

27. Tibetan Terminology - more modern and scientific terms in a glossary format, where you can also look up English terms (James Gentry from Mangalam Research Center)
    https://tibterminology.net/ 

28. Video: Tools for the Budding Lotsawa (James Gentry from Mangalam Research Center) https://vimeo.com/869725083/b1bbc7dffd?share=copy