Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one

script Script may refer to: Writing systems * Script, a distinctive writing system, based on a repertoire of specific elements or symbols, or that repertoire * Script (styles of handwriting) ** Script typeface, a typeface with characteristics of handw ...

to another that involves swapping letters (thus ''

trans- Trans- is a Latin prefix meaning "across", "beyond", or "on the other side of". Used alone, trans may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media * Trans (festival), a former festival in Belfast, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom * ''Trans'' (film ...

'' + '' 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 Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. The English language draws a terminological distinction (which does not exist in every language) between ''transla ...

as "

Hellenic Republic Greece,, or , romanized: ', officially the Hellenic Republic, is a country in Southeast Europe. It is situated on the southern tip of the Balkans, and is located at the crossroads of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Greece shares land borders with ...

", the usual transliteration to Latin script is , and the name for Russia in Cyrillic script, "", is

usually A convention is a set of agreed, stipulated, or generally accepted standards, norms, social norms, or criteria, often taking the form of a custom. In a social context, a convention may retain the character of an "unwritten law" of custom (for e ...

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 Long may refer to: Measurement * Long, characteristic of something of great duration * Long, characteristic of something of great length * Longitude (abbreviation: long.), a geographic coordinate * Longa (music), note value in early music mensur ...

Transcription Transcription refers to the process of converting sounds (voice, music etc.) into letters or musical notes, or producing a copy of something in another medium, including: Genetics * Transcription (biology), the copying of DNA into RNA, the fir ...

, conversely, seeks to capture sound rather than spelling; "" corresponds to in the

International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic transcription, phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standa ...

. 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 A bracket is either of two tall fore- or back-facing punctuation marks commonly used to isolate a segment of text or data from its surroundings. Typically deployed in symmetric pairs, an individual bracket may be identified as a 'left' or 'r ...

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 One-to-one or one to one may refer to: Mathematics and communication *One-to-one function, also called an injective function *One-to-one correspondence, also called a bijective function *One-to-one (communication), the act of an individual comm ...

, so a reader who knows the system can reconstruct the original spelling. Transliteration is opposed to

transcription Transcription refers to the process of converting sounds (voice, music etc.) into letters or musical notes, or producing a copy of something in another medium, including: Genetics * Transcription (biology), the copying of DNA into RNA, the fir ...

, 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 The palatine uvula, usually referred to as simply the uvula, is a conic projection from the back edge of the middle of the soft palate, composed of connective tissue containing a number of racemose glands, and some muscular fibers. It also conta ...

, but the pronunciation varies between different

dialects of Arabic The varieties (or dialects or vernacular languages) of Arabic, a Semitic language within the Afroasiatic family originating in the Arabian Peninsula, are the linguistic systems that Arabic speakers speak natively. There are considerable variati ...

. 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 consonant Click consonants, or clicks, are speech sounds that occur as consonants in many languages of Southern Africa and in three languages of East Africa. Examples familiar to English-speakers are the '' tut-tut'' (British spelling) or '' tsk! tsk!'' ...

s, which are quite unlike any phoneme in the language into which they are being transliterated. Some languages and

scripts Script may refer to: Writing systems * Script, a distinctive writing system, based on a repertoire of specific elements or symbols, or that repertoire * Script (styles of handwriting) ** Script typeface, a typeface with characteristics of handw ...

present particular difficulties to transcribers. These are discussed on separate pages. * Ancient Near East **

Transliterating cuneiform languages Cuneiform is a logo-syllabic script that was used to write several languages of the Ancient Middle East. The script was in active use from the early Bronze Age until the beginning of the Common Era. It is named for the characteristic wedge-sha ...

** Transliteration of Ancient Egyptian (''see also'' Egyptian hieroglyphs) ** Hieroglyphic Luwian * Armenian language *

Avestan Avestan (), or historically Zend, is an umbrella term for two Old Iranian languages: Old Avestan (spoken in the 2nd millennium BCE) and Younger Avestan (spoken in the 1st millennium BCE). They are known only from their conjoined use as the scrip ...

* Brahmic family ** Devanagari: see Devanagari transliteration ** Pali ** Tocharian ** Malayalam: see

Romanization of Malayalam There are several romanization schemes for the Malayalam script, including ITRANS and ISO 15919. ASCII schemes Typesetting Malayalam on computers became an issue with their spread in the late 20th century. The lack of diacritics on keyboards led ...

* Chinese language ** Transcription into Chinese characters **

Romanization of Chinese Romanization of Chinese () is the use of the Latin alphabet to transliterate Chinese. Chinese uses a logographic script and its characters do not represent phonemes directly. There have been many systems using Roman characters to represent Chin ...

Cyrillization of Chinese The Cyrillization of Chinese (''Hanyu Cyril Pinyin'') is the transcription of Chinese characters into the Cyrillic alphabet. The Palladius System is the official Russian standard for transcribing Chinese into Russian, with variants existing for U ...

Click languages Click consonants, or clicks, are speech sounds that occur as consonants in many languages of Southern Africa and in three languages of East Africa. Examples familiar to English-speakers are the '' tut-tut'' (British spelling) or '' tsk! tsk!'' ...

of Africa ** Khoisan languages **

Bantu languages The Bantu languages (English: , Proto-Bantu: *bantʊ̀) are a large family of languages spoken by the Bantu people of Central, Southern, Eastern africa and Southeast Africa. They form the largest branch of the Southern Bantoid languages. The t ...

* English language **

Hebraization of English The Hebraization of English (or Hebraicization) is the use of the Hebrew alphabet to write English. Because Hebrew uses an abjad, it can render English words in multiple ways. There are many uses for hebraization, which serve as a useful tool for ...

* Greek language **

Romanization of Greek Romanization of Greek is the transliteration (alphabet, letter-mapping) or Transcription (linguistics), transcription (pronunciation, sound-mapping) of text from the Greek alphabet into the Latin alphabet. History The conventions for Greek ort ...

** Greek alphabet **

Linear B Linear B was a syllabic script used for writing in Mycenaean Greek, the earliest attested form of Greek. The script predates the Greek alphabet by several centuries. The oldest Mycenaean writing dates to about 1400 BC. It is descended from ...

Greeklish Greeklish, a portmanteau of the words Greek and English, also known as Grenglish, Latinoellinika/Λατινοελληνικά or ASCII Greek, is the Greek language written using the Latin alphabet. Unlike standardized systems of Romanization of G ...

* Japanese language **

Romanization of Japanese The romanization of Japanese is the use of Latin script to write the Japanese language. This method of writing is sometimes referred to in Japanese as . Japanese is normally written in a combination of logographic characters borrowed from Ch ...

Cyrillization of Japanese The cyrillization of Japanese is the process of transliterating or transcribing the Japanese language into Cyrillic script in order to represent Japanese proper names or terms in various languages that use Cyrillic, as an aid to Japanese languag ...

* Khmer language ** Romanization of Khmer * Korean language ** Romanization of Korean * Persian language **

Persian alphabet The Persian alphabet ( fa, الفبای فارسی, Alefbâye Fârsi) is a writing system that is a version of the Arabic script used for the Persian language spoken in Iran ( Western Persian) and Afghanistan (Dari Persian) since the 7th cent ...

*** Cyrillic alphabet *** Romanization of Persian *** Persian chat alphabet * Semitic languages **

Ugaritic alphabet The Ugaritic writing system is a cuneiform abjad (consonantal alphabet) used from around either 1400 BCE or 1300 BCE for Ugaritic, an extinct Northwest Semitic language, and discovered in Ugarit (modern Ras Al Shamra), Syria, in 1928. It h ...

** Hebrew alphabet *** Romanization of Hebrew ** Arabic alphabet *** Romanization of Arabic ***

Arabic chat alphabet The Arabic chat alphabet, ''Arabizi'', Franco-Arabic (), refer to the Romanized alphabets for informal Arabic dialects in which Arabic script is transcribed or encoded into a combination of Latin script and Arabic numerals. These informal chat ...

* Slavic languages written in the

Cyrillic , bg, кирилица , mk, кирилица , russian: кириллица , sr, ћирилица, uk, кирилиця , fam1 = Egyptian hieroglyphs , fam2 = Proto-Sinaitic , fam3 = Phoenician , fam4 = G ...

or Glagolitic alphabets **

Romanization of Belarusian Romanization or Latinization of Belarusian is any system for transliterating written Belarusian language, Belarusian from Cyrillic script, Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet. Standard systems for romanizing Belarusian Standard systems for romanizing ...

Romanization of Bulgarian Romanization of Bulgarian is the practice of transliteration of text in Bulgarian from its conventional Cyrillic orthography into the Latin alphabet. Romanization can be used for various purposes, such as rendering of proper names and place names ...

** Romanization of Russian **

Romanization of Macedonian The romanization of Macedonian is the transliteration of text in Macedonian from the Macedonian Cyrillic alphabet into the Latin alphabet. Romanization can be used for various purposes, such as rendering of proper names in foreign contexts, or for ...

Romanization of Serbian The romanization of Serbian or latinization of Serbian is the representation of the Serbian language using Latin letters. Serbian is written in two alphabets, Serbian Cyrillic, a variation of the Cyrillic alphabet, and Gaj's Latin, or ''latinica' ...

Romanization of Ukrainian The romanization of Ukrainian, or Latinization of Ukrainian, is the representation of the Ukrainian language in Latin alphabet, Latin letters. Ukrainian is natively written in its own Ukrainian alphabet, which is based on the Cyrillic script. Rom ...

** Volapuk encoding * Thai language **

Romanization of Thai There are many systems for the romanization of the Thai language, i.e. representing the language in Latin script. These include systems of transliteration, and transcription. The most seen system in public space is Royal Thai General System of Tra ...

Urdu Language Urdu (;"Urdu"
''Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary''. ur, , link=no, ) is an Indo-Aryan languages, In ...

Romanization of Urdu Roman Urdu ( ur, ) is the name used for the Urdu language written with the Latin script, also known as the Roman script. According to the Urdu scholar Habib R. Sulemani: "Roman Urdu is strongly opposed by the traditional Arabic script lovers ...

Adopted

* Buckwalter transliteration * Devanagari transliteration * Hans Wehr transliteration * International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration *

Scientific transliteration of Cyrillic Scientific transliteration, variously called ''academic'', ''linguistic'', ''international'', or ''scholarly transliteration'', is an international system for transliteration of text from the Cyrillic script to the Latin script (romanization). Thi ...

* Transliteration of Ancient Egyptian * Transliterations of Manchu * Wylie transliteration

References

External links

International Components for Unicode transliteration services

– history of the transliteration of Slavic languages into Latin alphabets.
Transliteration of Non-Latin scripts
– Collection of transliteration tables for many non-Latin scripts maintained by Thomas T. Pedersen.
Unicode Transliteration Guidelines

United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names (UNGEGN)
– working group on Romanization Systems.
Library of Congress: Romanization Tables

Localtyping.com
implements google transliteration library and also allows to create To-Do Lists in English and Transliterated Languages.
onlinemarathityping.com
Use Google transliteration for easy typing.
Usage of Transliterations
– condensed description of the definition of transliteration and its usage. * G. Gerych
Transliteration of Cyrillic Alphabets.
Ottawa University, April 1965. 126 pp. – historical overview of the concept of transliteration and its evolution and application {{Authority control