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I have an Arabic and English spreadsheets containing people's information including first and last names. I have no identifier I can use other than those names, no unique ID or anything.

At the most basic level, I'm looking to see if there's a dictionary containing Arabic first and names and their English equivalent

"ali": "علي"

If there are better dictionaries that take into consideration the different ways people write their names, it would be even better

a["إلياس"] = ["elias", "eli', "elie"]

But I'm okay with the most basic dictionary, something is better than nothing

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It seems there are some commercial databases, but if you are brave and don't need an exhaustive list for 100% coverage, you could use Wikipedia articles for Arabic people

top level : List_of_Arabic_given_names

mid level : Abeer

bottom level : Abeer_Hamza

Other top levels : Category:Arabic_feminine_given_names, Category:Arabic-language_names

Wikipedia is available as a dump, so you wouldn't need to scrape. You could also switch back between AR and EN or other languages, which would give you URLs with the person's name

https://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D8%B9%D8%A8%D9%8A%D8%B1_%D8%AD%D9%85%D8%B2%D8%A9

enter image description here


Actually, a Wikidata/Sparql query would probably work, but I can't help much more than that.

Take a look at this question for getting city names in different languages.

And this slightly modified query.

enter image description here

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  • 1
    your solution is so smart, so smart, I'm very impressed
    – Lynob
    Jul 5, 2018 at 20:34
  • Glad it is useful. The mapping between identical wikipedia pages in different languages is actually a really valuable resource, because it's carefully curated by humans :)
    – philshem
    Jul 6, 2018 at 13:49

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