ALA-LC (
American Library Association Library of Congress) is a set of standards for
romanization, the representation of text in other
writing systems using the
Latin script.
Applications
The system is used to represent bibliographic information by North American libraries and the British Library (for acquisitions since 1975)
[Searching for Cyrillic items in the catalogues of the British Library: guidelines and transliteration tables]
and in publications throughout the English-speaking world.
The
Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules require catalogers to romanize access points from their non-Roman originals. However, as the
MARC standards have been expanded to allow records containing
Unicode characters,
many cataloguers now include bibliographic data in both Roman and original scripts. The emerging
Resource Description and Access continues many of AACR's recommendations but refers to the process as "
transliteration" rather than "Romanization."
Scripts
The ALA-LC Romanization includes over 70 romanization tables. Here are some examples of tables:
* A
Cherokee Romanization table was created by the LC and ALA in 2012 and subsequently approved by the Cherokee Tri-Council meeting in
Cherokee, North Carolina
Cherokee ( chr, ᏣᎳᎩ, translit=Tsalagi) is a census-designated place (CDP) in Swain County, North Carolina, Swain and Jackson County, North Carolina, Jackson counties in Western North Carolina, United States, within the Qualla Boundar ...
. It was the first ALA-LC Romanization table for a Native American syllabary.
* The
Chinese Romanization table used the
Wade–Giles transliteration system until 1997, when the Library of Congress (LC) announced a decision to switch to the
Pinyin system.
See also
*
ALA-LC romanization for Russian
*
Devanagari transliteration
*
Romanization of Arabic
*
Romanization of Armenian
*
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 Khmer
*
Romanization of Georgian
Romanization of Georgian is the process of transliterating the Georgian language from the Georgian script into the Latin script.
Georgian national system of romanization
This system, adopted in February 2002 by the State Department of Geodesy a ...
*
Romanization of Persian
*
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 ...
*
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. ...
References
External links
ALA-LC Romanization Tables
{{Romanization
Library cataloging and classification