Transliteration is the conversion of letters from one alphabet to another one, like from Greek to Latin. But it may as well be just a simplification within one alphabet, for example omitting any diacritics found in that alphabet or substituting special characters with a sequence of characters without diacritics.

Why transliteration is useful

Transliteration may not be mixed up with translation. When a Greek text is transliterated into the Latin alphabet you still need not understand it - but at least you can read it. Why do we need it then?

• Journalists have to make use of transliteration when reporting about foreign issues. It is much easier, if a name is written exactly the same way in every newspaper and article, isn't it?
• Libraries that build an index of their literature have to find a system that covers all possible books. A system that includes all authors whether they are from Russia, Greece or Germany. Therefore all authors and titles have to be represented using one writing system.
• How should road signs be written? I once read a funny article on the diversity of possibilities to write Sofia leading to the attempt to write it the same way on every sign.

Besides there may be other practical reasons for transliteration even when you know the language you are using. Most of these examples result from the digital lifestyle of our century. It is quite common to write texts without using any special characters in emails. For example if you do not have access to the appropriate keyboard or you want to assure that the recipient can read your email.

Ich wollte mit Ihnen über die neue Maßnahme sprechen, da es gewöhnlich einer längeren Eingewöhnungzeit bedarf.

A text like this short German passage is a result of a misinterpreted charset. (In this case an UTF-8 encoded email is displayed as ISO-8859-1). So if you like to avoid problems concerning the charset or you are not sure whether the recipient has installed the fonts to read your text an easy way could be to convert your text into text without any diacritics before.

(Of course there are better ways to solve the problem, but as a first, quick and easy solution it is a common way for a lot of people.)

How to transliterate

As you may guess from the diversity of reasons why one needs to transliterate text, there is as well a great diversity of possibilities to do it.

1. Convert the text just from the sounds of the origin. This is called phonetic transliteration or transcription.

   If there is just a small text in every day conversation and both sender and recipient know the language, it is easiest to use the phonetic way. One popular method on the Internet is for example Greeklish.

2. Take one of the many standards provided.

   Wherever there is a large group of people relying on the result, sticking to standards may be the best way to ensure unity.

   There are many standards available. For example international standards developed by the International Organisation for Standardization (ISO) like ISO 9 for Cyrillic or national standards like the Streamlined System for Bulgarian.

3. If you are very often using your keyboard you may even try a keyboard mapping.

   Well, this one is a really hard one and not a very practicable solution.

Things to keep in mind

The conversion of alphabets is useful, sometimes necessary and there are many ways to do it. Depending on the purpose there are still a few things to keep in mind.

Reversibility

The aim of transliteration is to be unique and therefore reversible. But this aim cannot always be achieved. If one alphabet has more characters than another one, a common practice is to use two characters to represent one.

The standard work of the German language (The Duden) proposes to write sch for the Russian letters zhe (ж) and sha (ш). It is a transcription rather than a transliteration as it is not unique. If you want to write the original word again containing one of these letters, it is not possible to tell how to write it due to the resulting ambiguity (at least if you do not know the word).

My favorite letter is the Russian letter shcha (щ) which is converted to schtsch. Which Russian letters could this have been?

Some standards are reversible like ISO 9 for Cyrillic transliteration, which provides an 1:1 mapping of Cyrillic and Latin characters. Therefore this standard gives full support for reversibility. The price to pay for it: there are a lot of special characters leading to the second issue to keep in mind.

Special Characters

Many transliterations make use of special characters. So if you need a transliteration because you do not have the right keyboard or you like to assure everyone will be able to read it, these schemes using special characters may not help. But they have other benefits, like reversibility and universal usage.

Universal Usage

A universal usage can only be guaranteed with international standards. But there are also many national standards and language specific solutions.

Gorbatschow (German) - Gorbachev (English) and Gorbatjov (Danish).

As you see and especially when using pronunciation-oriented transliteration there may be large differences between the languages.

Transliterate!

Now that you got an impression on the different aspects of the conversion of characters: chose which one fits your needs best and transliterate!

If you like someone else to do it for you feel free to use Lingua::Translit. It is a tool that converts text between various writing systems. Transliterations are based on national or international standards or applies commonly used rules.

Lingua::Translit is provided as an online service as well as an open source Perl library.