Transliterating a natural language text means converting it from one writing system to another by using a set of predefined character or character sequence mappings. These mappings may be context dependent, too.

Transliterations have been standardized for a variety of languages and writing systems by national and international organizations like ISO, DIN or GOST. This way, transliterated natural language text can easily be exchanged and interpreted by those not familiar with its native alphabet.

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.