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Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one script to another^[1] that involves swapping letters (thus trans- + liter-) in predictable ways (such as α → a, д → d, χ → ch, ն → n or æ → e).

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

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 above example, λλ is transliterated as 'll', but pronounced /l/; Δ is transliterated as 'D', but pronounced /ð/; and η is transliterated as 'ē', though it is pronounced /i/ (exactly like ι) and is not long.

Conversely, transcription notes the sounds but not necessarily the spelling. So "Ελληνική Δημοκρατία" could be transcribed as "elinikí ðimokratía", which does not specify which of the /i/ sounds are written as η and which as ι.

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. If the relations between letters and sounds are similar in both languages, a transliteration may be very close to a transcription. 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 is 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 [i] (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 [ɛː], it is often transliterated as an <e> with a macron, even for modern texts.) On the other hand, <ευ> is sometimes pronounced [ev] and sometimes [ef], 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,^[2] 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 [k], 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.^[3] Another example is the Russian letter "Х" (kha). It is pronounced as the voiceless velar fricative /x/, like the Scottish pronunciation of ⟨ch⟩ 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
  
  


• 
  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

Adopted

• Buckwalter transliteration


• Devanagari transliteration


• Hans Wehr transliteration


• International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration


• Scientific transliteration of Cyrillic


• Transliteration of Ancient Egyptian


• Transliterations of Manchu


• Wylie transliteration

See also

• International Components for Unicode


• Latin script


• List of ISO transliterations


• Orthographic transcription


• Phonemic orthography


• Phonetic transcription


• Romanization


• Spread of the Latin script


• Substitution cipher


• Transcription (linguistics)

References

External links

Look up transliteration in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Listen to this article (info/dl)

This audio file was created from a revision of the article "Transliteration" dated 2005-04-13, and does not reflect subsequent edits to the article. (Audio help)

More spoken articles

• 
  International Components for Unicode transliteration services ICU User Guide: Transforms
  


• 
  Transliteration history – 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