Transliteration

Transliteration is the process of representing or intending to represent a word, phrase, or text in a different script or writing system. Transliterations are designed to convey the pronunciation of the original word in a different script, allowing readers or speakers of that script to approximate the sounds and pronunciation of the original word. Transliterations do not change the pronunciation of the word. Thus, in the Greek example above, ⟨λλ⟩ is transliterated as ⟨ll⟩, though it is pronounced exactly the same way as ⟨l⟩, i.e. ; likewise, ⟨Δ⟩ is transliterated as ⟨D⟩, though pronounced as rather than , and ⟨η⟩ is transliterated ⟨ē⟩, though pronounced as (exactly like ⟨ι⟩) rather than or , and is not a long vowel.

Transcription, conversely, seeks to capture sound, but phonetically approximate it into the new script; ⟨Ελληνική Δημοκρατία⟩ corresponds to in the International Phonetic Alphabet. Here, ⟨ή⟩ palatalizes the preceding ⟨κ⟩, and thus is represented in IPA with , the palatal allophone of . Likewise, the tonos diacritic ⟨΄⟩ to denote stress of a syllable is transcribed as ⟨⟩ in IPA.

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, which adapts written form in the source language, is opposed to transcription, which renders the spoken form of the source language and hence its pronunciation. 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.

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

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Definitions

Difference from transcription

Challenges

Adopted

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