Aurebesh Translator
Type English, get Aurebesh, the alphabet on every screen and sign in the Star Wars galaxy. Click your way back the other direction too. Free, instant, and it now copies out as actual Aurebesh instead of plain English.
The alphabet hiding in the background of every film
Star Wars has spent fifty years filling in its own background. Droids have personalities, planets have weather, the politics run to treaties and trade disputes. And in most of those shots there is writing, on a cockpit readout or a corridor wall, that almost nobody watching can read.
That writing is Aurebesh. Pause a film on a control panel, walk through Galaxy's Edge, or look at the signage in Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and you have already seen plenty of it. It is the written form of Galactic Basic, the language the English-speaking characters are meant to be speaking, and it maps one letter onto one letter of our own alphabet.
Which means any English sentence can become Aurebesh, and any Aurebesh inscription can come back. The tool for that is below. If you only came for the tool, skip ahead.
The script itselfWhat is Aurebesh?
Aurebesh is the alphabet of Galactic Basic Standard, the common tongue of the galaxy. It turned up first as background art in Return of the Jedi in 1983, but nobody had actually pinned down a full alphabet. That happened in 1993, when artist Stephen Crane worked one out from Joe Johnston's on-screen glyphs for the West End Games Star Wars Miniatures Battles Companion. Lucasfilm took up Crane's version, and from The Phantom Menace onward it has been the default script on screen.
The name is just the first two letters: Aurek for A, Besh for B, the same trick English plays with alpha and beta. There are 34 characters. Twenty-six map to A through Z, and eight more are digraphs for common pairings: ch, sh, th, ae, eo, kh, ng, oo.
Aurebesh is not a language. It is English wearing a different set of letters.
It is a cipher, not a built language like Mando'a or Huttese. The grammar, the spelling and the idiom all stay English, and only the letter shapes change. That is why background signage in the films translates straight into ordinary English, and why a tool like this one can work at all. You are learning handwriting, not vocabulary.
The toolThe Aurebesh Translator
Aurebesh Console
Because Aurebesh is a one-for-one substitution for the Latin alphabet, the translator simply draws the letters you type in an Aurebesh typeface. The characters underneath are still ordinary English letters. So an old-fashioned copy and paste took the letters and left the font behind, and what landed at the other end was English. That was the bug.
The fix is to copy a picture instead of characters. Copy as Aurebesh image renders your line to a transparent PNG and puts that on the clipboard, so the glyphs survive the paste anywhere, font or no font. Download PNG saves the same render if you need a file rather than a clipboard. Copy plain letters is the old behaviour, kept on purpose, because it is the one you want when the destination is Illustrator, Photoshop or a laser cutter and you will pick the font there. Numbers, punctuation and spaces pass through untouched, which is how they usually appear in Star Wars signage anyway.
The complete Aurebesh alphabet
Every letter has a name, and each name starts with the letter it stands for. The chart below gives the glyph, the English letter and the canonical name for all 26.
Digraphs, the eight you will occasionally see
There are also eight glyphs for common letter pairs. You do not need them, since spelling the pair out works fine, but film and game signage uses them now and then because they look tidier. They are ch (cherek), sh (shen), th (thesh), ae (enth), eo (onith), kh (krenth), ng (nen) and oo (orenth). This translator sticks to single letters, which is what most modern Star Wars media does.
Using Aurebesh in the wildWhat people actually use Aurebesh for
Going by the messages I get, it is mostly these five things.
Tattoos and inscriptions
Aurebesh sits alongside Tengwar and High Valyrian as one of the scripts tattoo studios get asked for most. Get a second person to check the spelling before the needle goes in, because an artist working from an image will copy your typo exactly as drawn. Send them the PNG from the download button rather than pasted text and you both know you are looking at the same glyphs. Watch the letter spacing too. Aurebesh is angular and dense, and set too tight a word turns into one solid block.
Props, cosplay and homemade gifts
The script engraves and cuts well on metal, wood, vinyl and paper. Translate the line, drop the image straight into your layout or paste the plain letters into a graphics program with the font installed, and you have set dressing in a couple of minutes. The classic version of this is a phrase inside a lightsaber hilt or on the back of a wedding band.
Greebles and tabletop terrain
For dioramas, X-Wing or Legion terrain, or a sci-fi model railway, Aurebesh is about the cheapest detail you can add. Print warning labels, room numbers and system codes, weather them with a bit of powder, and glue them to otherwise anonymous grey plastic. The terrain stops looking generic and starts looking Imperial.
Wedding stationery and event design
Couples do RSVPs, table numbers and order-of-ceremony cards in Aurebesh for Star Wars weddings. Put a plain English version on the same card so guests who are not fans can still find their table. Set against a serif body face, the two scripts together look better than either alone.
Notebooks and journals
One letter for one letter means you can write English in Aurebesh by hand once you know the alphabet. It will not hold up against anyone who tries properly, but it handles the person reading over your shoulder on the train.
Related toolsIf you came for the other Star Wars lettering
Aurebesh is one of two bits of Star Wars typography people chase. The other is the crawl, and there is a fair bit on that here already. Start with the yellow crawl text generator guide, which covers the banana yellow (#FFE81F), the fonts the various generators actually use, and the lower-case trick that stops them mangling your text. If you want to build a full opening title, there is a crawl generator on the site, and the text of every crawl from the films if you would rather read them all in one place first, or copy the cadence of a real one.
On the typography itself, what the crawl font really is answers the question properly, and the history of the crawl covers how it got that way, including the Flash Gordon serials it borrowed from and Brian De Palma's pass at rewriting the A New Hope opening. For the logo lettering rather than the crawl, use the Star Wars font creator. And if what you actually want is a name rather than a sign, the droid designation generator will give you one.
Frequently askedAurebesh, answered
Is Aurebesh a real language?
No. Aurebesh is a writing system, a one-to-one substitution alphabet for English. It has no unique vocabulary, grammar, or syntax of its own. Characters in Star Wars who speak Basic are speaking English, or your dub language, with Aurebesh as the written form.
Why did my copied Aurebesh paste as English?
A plain copy carries characters, not fonts. What you see on screen is A to Z drawn by an Aurebesh typeface, so as soon as those characters land somewhere using a normal font they look like the English letters they always were.
Use Copy as Aurebesh image, or Download PNG if you would rather have a file. Both carry the glyphs themselves, so nothing depends on the font at the far end. Copy plain letters is still there for design software where you will apply the font yourself.
Can I paste Aurebesh into Word, Google Docs or Slides?
Yes, as an image. Copy it with the image button and paste straight in, and it will look right on any machine, including one with no Aurebesh font installed. It will not be editable text once it is in there, so get the wording right before you copy.
Can I read Aurebesh once I learn the letters?
Yes. Most people who study the alphabet for an hour can puzzle out short signs in screenshots and Disney Park photos within a day. Reading at normal English speed takes longer, but it is well within reach with regular exposure.
Does the translator work for numbers and punctuation?
Numbers pass through as Latin digits because Aurebesh borrows Arabic numerals in canon. Standard punctuation, including periods, commas, apostrophes, and question marks, also passes through unchanged.
Is Aurebesh the only writing system in Star Wars?
No, but it is by far the most common. The galaxy also features Mando'a, the language of the Mandalorians, Huttese, Sith script, High Galactic, and dozens of species-specific scripts. Aurebesh is the default, but it is not the only option.
Can I use the translator output commercially?
The translation itself, meaning your own words rendered as Aurebesh glyphs, is yours to use. The Aurebesh font is a separate matter. Many Aurebesh fonts are free for personal use but require a licence for commercial projects such as logos, merchandise, or paid client work. That applies to the PNG the download button produces as well, since the picture is made with the font. Check the licence of any specific font file before using it commercially.
Why does my on-screen output look like regular English?
The Aurebesh font is loaded from a CDN. On most networks it loads quickly, but restrictive corporate firewalls can block font CDNs. If the output panel reads as plain English, that is the fallback kicking in, and the image copy will warn you rather than hand you a picture of English letters. Refresh the page on a different network, or self-host the font.
A small note on accuracy
If the thing you are translating is permanent, a tattoo or an engraving or a print you are paying for, run it back through the reverse direction and check it comes out the way you put it in. A typo in English is the same typo in Aurebesh, and those dense angular letters hide spelling mistakes from a quick second reading. The check takes five seconds.
Otherwise, go and letter something. May the Force be with you.
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