# Unicode → ASCII Transliterator

Convert any Unicode text to plain ASCII: strip accents (é→e, ñ→n), romanize Cyrillic/Greek, and transliterate Chinese to pinyin (北京→Bei Jing). Drops emojis and symbols that have no ASCII equivalent.

> Canonical page: https://elysiatools.com/en/tools/unicode-to-ascii-transliterator

- **Category:** Text Processing

- **Keywords:** unicode to ascii, transliterate, strip accents, remove diacritics, romanize, pinyin, deaccent, ascii conversion

## Overview

A lossy-but-readable conversion from full Unicode to 7-bit ASCII. Latin combining marks are stripped (Façade→Facade, Ångström→Angstrom), non-Latin scripts are romanized (Привет→Privet, Αθήνα→Athina), and Chinese characters are converted to pinyin via pinyin-pro with correct polyphone handling (重庆→chong qing). Japanese kanji come out at pinyin grade since true romaji requires a morphological dictionary. Useful for building ASCII-only filenames, search indexes, slug precursors, legacy-system data entry, and cleaning copy-pasted text that carries invisible Unicode. Shows a before/after non-ASCII count so you can confirm the result is pure ASCII.

## Inputs

- **Text to transliterate** (textarea): Paste text with accents, Cyrillic, Greek, Chinese… e.g. "Café 北京 naïve Ångström"
- **Unknown handling** (select)

## When to use

- Create ASCII-only filenames and slug precursors from text containing accents or non-Latin scripts.
- Prepare multilingual text for legacy systems or data-entry fields that accept only ASCII.
- Clean copied text and check the before-and-after count of non-ASCII characters.

## How it works

- Paste the text to transliterate into the text field.
- Choose whether non-translatable emojis and symbols should be dropped or kept.
- The tool removes Latin diacritics and romanizes supported non-Latin scripts, including Chinese to pinyin.
- Review the converted text and the non-ASCII count to verify the result.

## Use cases

- Generate readable ASCII-only filenames from multilingual text.
- Create a plain-text precursor for search indexes or URL slugs.
- Clean multilingual copy before entering it into systems with ASCII-only requirements.

## Frequently asked questions

### What does this tool convert?

It converts Unicode text to readable ASCII, including accented Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, and Chinese text.

### How are accented letters handled?

Accents and other Latin diacritics are removed, so é becomes e and Å becomes A.

### How is Chinese transliterated?

Chinese characters are converted to pinyin, with polyphonic characters handled according to their context where supported.

### What happens to emojis and symbols?

By default, non-translatable emojis and symbols are dropped. You can choose to keep them as-is.

### Will the output always be pure ASCII?

Yes when non-translatable characters are dropped. Keeping unknown characters can leave non-ASCII characters in the output.

## Related tools

- [Chinese Character Extractor (汉字提取器)](https://elysiatools.com/en/tools/chinese-character-extractor): Extract all Chinese characters from text, filtering out punctuation and English letters, numbers, and non-Chinese symbols
- [Emoji Extractor](https://elysiatools.com/en/tools/emoji-extractor): Extract all Unicode emoji from text, or optionally remove emojis
- [HTML Tag Stripper (HTML标签清除)](https://elysiatools.com/en/tools/new-html-tag-stripper): Remove HTML tags from code and extract clean text content
- [Pig Latin Converter](https://elysiatools.com/en/tools/pig-latin-converter): Convert English text to and from Pig Latin. Handles consonant clusters, vowel words, QU units, and capitalization.
- [Prefix Remover](https://elysiatools.com/en/tools/prefix-remover): Remove common prefixes from each line with intelligent detection and customizable options
- [Suffix Remover](https://elysiatools.com/en/tools/suffix-remover): Remove common suffixes from each line with intelligent detection and customizable options
- [Text Emoji Remover](https://elysiatools.com/en/tools/text-emoji-remover): Remove emojis and special symbols from text content
- [Remove a Prefix from Words](https://elysiatools.com/en/tools/text-remove-prefix-words): Quickly remove any prefix from all words in text

## Samples

- [Special Characters Samples](https://elysiatools.com/en/samples/text-special-characters-samples): Sample text files with various special characters, punctuation, and symbols for testing non-alphanumeric character removal
- [Text with Emoji Samples](https://elysiatools.com/en/samples/text-with-emoji-samples): Mixed language text containing various Unicode emojis for testing emoji extraction
- [Hex/Unicode Encoding Format Samples](https://elysiatools.com/en/samples/text-hex-unicode-formats): Examples of hex (\xXX) and unicode (\uXXXX) escape sequence encoding formats
- [Duplicate Line Samples](https://elysiatools.com/en/samples/text-duplicate-line-samples): Sample files with various types of duplicate lines for testing duplicate removal tools