Transliterate

Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one script to another that involves swapping letters (thus '' trans-'' + '' liter-'') in predictable ways, such as Greek → , Cyrillic → , Greek → the digraph , Armenian → or Latin → .

For instance, for the Modern Greek term "", which is usually translated as "Hellenic Republic", the usual transliteration to Latin script is , and the name for Russia in Cyrillic script, "", is usually transliterated as .

Transliteration is not primarily concerned with representing the sounds of the original but rather with representing the characters, ideally accurately and unambiguously. Thus, in the Greek above example, is transliterated though it is pronounced , is transliterated though pronounced , and is transliterated , though it is pronounced (exactly like ) and is not long.

Transcription, conversely, seeks to capture sound rather than spelling; "" corresponds to in the International Phonetic Alphabet. While differentiation is lost in the case of , note how the letter shape becomes either or depending on the vowel that follows it.

Angle brackets may be used to set off transliteration, as opposed to slashes for phonemic transcription and square brackets for phonetic transcription. Angle brackets may also be used to set off characters in the original script. Conventions and author preferences vary.

Definitions

Systematic transliteration is a mapping from one system of writing into another, typically grapheme to grapheme. Most transliteration systems are one-to-one, so a reader who knows the system can reconstruct the original spelling.

Transliteration is opposed to transcription, which maps the '' sounds'' of one language into a writing system. Still, most systems of transliteration map the letters of the source script to letters pronounced similarly in the target script, for some specific pair of source and target language. Transliteration may be very close to transcription if the relations between letters and sounds are similar in both languages. In practice, there are some mixed transliteration/transcription systems that transliterate a part of the original script and transcribe the rest.

For many script pairs, there are one or more standard transliteration systems. However, unsystematic transliteration is common.

Difference from transcription

In Modern Greek, the letters ⟨η⟩ ⟨ι⟩ ⟨υ⟩ and the letter combinations ⟨ει⟩ ⟨oι⟩ ⟨υι⟩ are pronounced (except when pronounced as semivowels), and a modern transcription renders them all as ⟨i⟩; but a transliteration distinguishes them, for example by transliterating to ⟨ē⟩ ⟨i⟩ ⟨y⟩ and ⟨ei⟩ ⟨oi⟩ ⟨yi⟩. (As the ancient pronunciation of ⟨η⟩ was , it is often transliterated as an ⟨e⟩ with a macron, even for modern texts.) On the other hand, ⟨ευ⟩ is sometimes pronounced and sometimes , depending on the following sound. A transcription distinguishes them, but this is no requirement for a transliteration. The initial letter 'h' reflecting the historical rough breathing in words such as Ellēnikē should logically be omitted in transcription from Koine Greek on, and from transliteration from 1982 on, but it is nonetheless frequently encountered.

Challenges

A simple example of difficulties in transliteration is the Arabic letter qāf. It is pronounced, in literary Arabic, approximately like English except that the tongue makes contact not on the soft palate but on the uvula, but the pronunciation varies between different dialects of Arabic. The letter is sometimes transliterated into "g", sometimes into "q" and rarely even into "k" in English. Another example is the Russian letter "Х" (kha). It is pronounced as the voiceless velar fricative , like the Scottish pronunciation of in "loch". This sound is not present in most forms of English and is often transliterated as "kh" as in Nikita Khrushchev. Many languages have phonemic sounds, such as click consonants, which are quite unlike any phoneme in the language into which they are being transliterated.

Some languages and scripts present particular difficulties to transcribers. These are discussed on separate pages.

* Ancient Near East
** Transliterating cuneiform languages
** Transliteration of Ancient Egyptian (''see also'' Egyptian hieroglyphs)
** Hieroglyphic Luwian
* Armenian language
* Avestan
* Brahmic family
** Devanagari: see Devanagari transliteration
** Pali
** Tocharian
** Malayalam: see Romanization of Malayalam
* Chinese language
** Transcription into Chinese characters
** Romanization of Chinese
** Cyrillization of Chinese
* Click languages of Africa
** Khoisan languages
** Bantu languages
* English language
** Hebraization of English
* Greek language
** Romanization of Greek
** Greek alphabet
** Linear B
** Greeklish
* Japanese language
** Romanization of Japanese
** Cyrillization of Japanese
* Khmer language
** Romanization of Khmer
* Korean language
** Romanization of Korean
* Persian language
** Persian alphabet
*** Cyrillic alphabet
*** Romanization of Persian
*** Persian chat alphabet
* Semitic languages
** Ugaritic alphabet
** Hebrew alphabet
*** Romanization of Hebrew
** Arabic alphabet
*** Romanization of Arabic
*** Arabic chat alphabet
* Slavic languages written in the Cyrillic or Glagolitic alphabets
** Romanization of Belarusian
** Romanization of Bulgarian
** Romanization of Russian
** Romanization of Macedonian
** Romanization of Serbian
** Romanization of Ukrainian
** Volapuk encoding
* Thai language
** Romanization of Thai
* Urdu Language

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