Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one

script Script may refer to: Writing systems * Script, a distinctive writing system, based on a repertoire of specific elements or symbols, or that repertoire * Script (styles of handwriting) ** Script typeface, a typeface with characteristics of handw ...

to another that involves swapping

letters Letter, letters, or literature may refer to: Characters typeface * Letter (alphabet), a character representing one or more of the sounds used in speech; any of the symbols of an alphabet. * Letterform, the graphic form of a letter of the alphabe ...

(thus '' trans-'' + '' liter-'') in predictable ways, such as Greek → , Cyrillic → , Greek → the digraph , Armenian → or Latin → . For instance, for the

Modern Greek Modern Greek (, , or , ''Kiní Neoellinikí Glóssa''), generally referred to by speakers simply as Greek (, ), refers collectively to the dialects of the Greek language spoken in the modern era, including the official standardized form of the ...

term "", which is usually

translated Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. The English language draws a terminological distinction (which does not exist in every language) between ''transla ...

as "

Hellenic Republic Greece,, or , romanized: ', officially the Hellenic Republic, is a country in Southeast Europe. It is situated on the southern tip of the Balkans, and is located at the crossroads of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Greece shares land borders with ...

", the usual transliteration to

Latin script The Latin script, also known as Roman script, is an alphabetic writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae, in southern Italy ...

is , and the name for

Russia Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a List of transcontinental countries, transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and North Asia, Northern Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, largest country in the ...

Cyrillic script The Cyrillic script ( ), Slavonic script or the Slavic script, is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic languages, Slavic, Turkic languages, Turkic, Mongolic languages, ...

, "", is usually transliterated as . Transliteration is not primarily concerned with representing the

sounds In physics, sound is a vibration that propagates as an acoustic wave, through a transmission medium such as a gas, liquid or solid. In human physiology and psychology, sound is the ''reception'' of such waves and their ''perception'' by the ...

of the original but rather with representing the characters, ideally accurately and unambiguously. Thus, in the Greek above example, is transliterated though it is pronounced , is transliterated though pronounced , and is transliterated , though it is pronounced (exactly like ) and is not

long Long may refer to: Measurement * Long, characteristic of something of great duration * Long, characteristic of something of great length * Longitude (abbreviation: long.), a geographic coordinate * Longa (music), note value in early music mens ...

Transcription Transcription refers to the process of converting sounds (voice, music etc.) into letters or musical notes, or producing a copy of something in another medium, including: Genetics * Transcription (biology), the copying of DNA into RNA, the fir ...

, conversely, seeks to capture sound rather than spelling; "" corresponds to in the

International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic transcription, phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standa ...

. While differentiation is lost in the case of , note how the letter shape becomes either or depending on the vowel that follows it.

Angle brackets A bracket is either of two tall fore- or back-facing punctuation marks commonly used to isolate a segment of text or data from its surroundings. Typically deployed in symmetric pairs, an individual bracket may be identified as a 'left' or 'r ...

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 In linguistics, a grapheme is the smallest functional unit of a writing system. The word ''grapheme'' is derived and the suffix ''-eme'' by analogy with ''phoneme'' and other names of emic units. The study of graphemes is called ''graphemics' ...

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 Transcription refers to the process of converting sounds (voice, music etc.) into letters or musical notes, or producing a copy of something in another medium, including: Genetics * Transcription (biology), the copying of DNA into RNA, the fir ...

, which maps the ''

'' of one

language Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of met ...

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. Transliteration may be very close to transcription if the relations between letters and sounds are similar in both languages. 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 are one or more standard transliteration systems. However, unsystematic transliteration is common.

Difference from transcription

In Modern

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

, the letters ⟨η⟩ ⟨ι⟩ ⟨υ⟩ and the letter combinations ⟨ει⟩ ⟨oι⟩ ⟨υι⟩ are pronounced (except when pronounced as

semivowel In phonetics and phonology, a semivowel, glide or semiconsonant is a sound that is phonetically similar to a vowel sound but functions as the syllable boundary, rather than as the nucleus of a syllable. Examples of semivowels in English are the ...

s), 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 , it is often transliterated as an ⟨e⟩ with a macron, even for modern texts.) On the other hand, ⟨ευ⟩ is sometimes pronounced and sometimes , 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 the polytonic orthography of Ancient Greek, the rough breathing ( grc, δασὺ πνεῦμα, dasỳ pneûma or ''daseîa''; la, spīritus asper) character is a diacritical mark used to indicate the presence of an sound before a vowel, d ...

in words such as Ellēnikē should logically be omitted in transcription from

Koine Greek Koine Greek (; Koine el, ἡ κοινὴ διάλεκτος, hē koinè diálektos, the common dialect; ), also known as Hellenistic Greek, common Attic, the Alexandrian dialect, Biblical Greek or New Testament Greek, was the common supra-reg ...

on, and from transliteration from 1982 on, but it is nonetheless frequently encountered.

Challenges

A simple example of difficulties in transliteration is the

Arabic Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic languages, Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C ...

letter

qāf Qoph ( Phoenician Qōp ) is the nineteenth letter of the Semitic scripts. Aramaic Qop is derived from the Phoenician letter, and derivations from Aramaic include Hebrew Qof , Syriac Qōp̄ ܩ and Arabic . Its original sound value was a W ...

. It is pronounced, in literary Arabic, approximately like English except that the tongue makes contact not on the

soft palate The soft palate (also known as the velum, palatal velum, or muscular palate) is, in mammals, the soft tissue constituting the back of the roof of the mouth. The soft palate is part of the palate of the mouth; the other part is the hard palate. ...

but on the

uvula The palatine uvula, usually referred to as simply the uvula, is a conic projection from the back edge of the middle of the soft palate, composed of connective tissue containing a number of racemose glands, and some muscular fibers. It also conta ...

, but the pronunciation varies between different

dialects of Arabic The varieties (or dialects or vernacular languages) of Arabic, a Semitic language within the Afroasiatic family originating in the Arabian Peninsula, are the linguistic systems that Arabic speakers speak natively. There are considerable variati ...

. The letter is sometimes transliterated into "g", sometimes into "q" and rarely even into "k" in English. Another example is the Russian letter "Х" (kha). It is pronounced as the

voiceless velar fricative The voiceless velar fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. It was part of the consonant inventory of Old English and can still be found in some dialects of English, most notably in Scottish English, e.g. in ''loc ...

, like the Scottish pronunciation of in "loch". This sound is not present in most forms of English and is often transliterated as "kh" as in

Nikita Khrushchev Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev (– 11 September 1971) was the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964 and chairman of the country's Council of Ministers from 1958 to 1964. During his rule, Khrushchev s ...

. Many languages have phonemic sounds, such as

click consonant Click consonants, or clicks, are speech sounds that occur as consonants in many languages of Southern Africa and in three languages of East Africa. Examples familiar to English-speakers are the '' tut-tut'' (British spelling) or '' tsk! tsk!'' ...

s, which are quite unlike any phoneme in the language into which they are being transliterated. Some languages and

scripts Script may refer to: Writing systems * Script, a distinctive writing system, based on a repertoire of specific elements or symbols, or that repertoire * Script (styles of handwriting) ** Script typeface, a typeface with characteristics of handw ...

present particular difficulties to transcribers. These are discussed on separate pages. *

Ancient Near East The ancient Near East was the home of early civilizations within a region roughly corresponding to the modern Middle East: Mesopotamia (modern Iraq, southeast Turkey, southwest Iran and northeastern Syria), ancient Egypt, ancient Iran ( Elam, ...

Transliterating cuneiform languages Cuneiform is a logo-syllabic script that was used to write several languages of the Ancient Middle East. The script was in active use from the early Bronze Age until the beginning of the Common Era. It is named for the characteristic wedge-sh ...

Transliteration of Ancient Egyptian As used for Egyptology, transliteration of Ancient Egyptian is the process of converting (or mapping) texts written as Egyptian language symbols to alphabetic symbols representing uniliteral Egyptian hieroglyphs, hieroglyphs or their hieratic and D ...

(''see also''

Egyptian hieroglyphs Egyptian hieroglyphs (, ) were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt, used for writing the Egyptian language. Hieroglyphs combined logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with some 1,000 distinct characters.There were about 1,00 ...

) ** Hieroglyphic

Luwian The Luwians were a group of Anatolian peoples who lived in central, western, and southern Anatolia, in present-day Turkey, during the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. They spoke the Luwian language, an Indo-European language of the Anatolian sub-fa ...

Armenian language Armenian ( classical: , reformed: , , ) is an Indo-European language and an independent branch of that family of languages. It is the official language of Armenia. Historically spoken in the Armenian Highlands, today Armenian is widely spoken t ...

Avestan Avestan (), or historically Zend, is an umbrella term for two Old Iranian languages: Old Avestan (spoken in the 2nd millennium BCE) and Younger Avestan (spoken in the 1st millennium BCE). They are known only from their conjoined use as the scrip ...

Brahmic family The Brahmic scripts, also known as Indic scripts, are a family of abugida writing systems. They are used throughout the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia and parts of East Asia. They are descended from the Brahmi script of ancient India ...

Devanagari Devanagari ( ; , , Sanskrit pronunciation: ), also called Nagari (),Kathleen Kuiper (2010), The Culture of India, New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, , page 83 is a left-to-right abugida (a type of segmental Writing systems#Segmental syste ...

: see

Devanagari transliteration Devanagari is an Indian script used for many languages of India and Nepal, including Hindi, Marathi, Nepali and Sanskrit. There are several somewhat similar methods of transliteration from Devanagari to the Roman script (a process sometimes ...

Pali Pali () is a Middle Indo-Aryan liturgical language native to the Indian subcontinent. It is widely studied because it is the language of the Buddhist ''Pāli Canon'' or ''Tipiṭaka'' as well as the sacred language of ''Theravāda'' Buddhism ...

** Tocharian **

Malayalam Malayalam (; , ) is a Dravidian language spoken in the Indian state of Kerala and the union territories of Lakshadweep and Puducherry (Mahé district) by the Malayali people. It is one of 22 scheduled languages of India. Malayalam was des ...

: see

Romanization of Malayalam There are several romanization schemes for the Malayalam script, including ITRANS and ISO 15919. ASCII schemes Typesetting Malayalam on computers became an issue with their spread in the late 20th century. The lack of diacritics on keyboards led ...

Chinese language Chinese (, especially when referring to written Chinese) is a group of languages spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in Greater China. About 1.3 billion people (or approximately 16% of the wor ...

Transcription into Chinese characters Transcription into Chinese characters is the use of traditional or simplified Chinese characters to ''phonetically'' transcribe the sound of terms and names of foreign words to the Chinese language. Transcription is distinct from translation in ...

Romanization of Chinese Romanization of Chinese () is the use of the Latin alphabet to transliterate Chinese. Chinese uses a logographic script and its characters do not represent phonemes directly. There have been many systems using Roman characters to represent Chin ...

Cyrillization of Chinese The Cyrillization of Chinese (''Hanyu Cyril Pinyin'') is the transcription of Chinese characters into the Cyrillic alphabet. The Palladius System is the official Russian standard for transcribing Chinese into Russian, with variants existing for U ...

Click languages Click consonants, or clicks, are speech sounds that occur as consonants in many languages of Southern Africa and in three languages of East Africa. Examples familiar to English-speakers are the '' tut-tut'' (British spelling) or '' tsk! tsk!'' ...

of Africa **

Khoisan languages The Khoisan languages (; also Khoesan or Khoesaan) are a group of African languages originally classified together by Joseph Greenberg. Khoisan languages share click consonants and do not belong to other African language families. For much of th ...

Bantu languages The Bantu languages (English: , Proto-Bantu: *bantʊ̀) are a large family of languages spoken by the Bantu people of Central, Southern, Eastern africa and Southeast Africa. They form the largest branch of the Southern Bantoid languages. The t ...

English language English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the is ...

Hebraization of English The Hebraization of English (or Hebraicization) is the use of the Hebrew alphabet to write English. Because Hebrew uses an abjad, it can render English words in multiple ways. There are many uses for hebraization, which serve as a useful tool for ...

Greek language Greek ( el, label=Modern Greek, Ελληνικά, Elliniká, ; grc, Ἑλληνική, Hellēnikḗ) is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, native to Greece, Cyprus, southern Italy (Calabria and Salento), southern Al ...

Romanization of Greek Romanization of Greek is the transliteration (alphabet, letter-mapping) or Transcription (linguistics), transcription (pronunciation, sound-mapping) of text from the Greek alphabet into the Latin alphabet. History The conventions for Greek ort ...

Greek alphabet The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BCE. It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was the earliest known alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as we ...

Linear B Linear B was a syllabic script used for writing in Mycenaean Greek, the earliest attested form of Greek. The script predates the Greek alphabet by several centuries. The oldest Mycenaean writing dates to about 1400 BC. It is descended from ...

** Greeklish *

Japanese language is spoken natively by about 128 million people, primarily by Japanese people and primarily in Japan, the only country where it is the national language. Japanese belongs to the Japonic or Japanese- Ryukyuan language family. There have been ma ...

Romanization of Japanese The romanization of Japanese is the use of Latin script to write the Japanese language. This method of writing is sometimes referred to in Japanese as . Japanese is normally written in a combination of logographic characters borrowed from Ch ...

Cyrillization of Japanese The cyrillization of Japanese is the process of transliterating or transcribing the Japanese language into Cyrillic script in order to represent Japanese proper names or terms in various languages that use Cyrillic, as an aid to Japanese languag ...

Khmer language Khmer (; , ) is an Austroasiatic languages, Austroasiatic language spoken by the Khmer people, and the Official language, official and national language of Cambodia. Khmer has been influenced considerably by Sanskrit and Pāli, Pali, especiall ...

Romanization of Khmer The romanization of Khmer is a representation of the Khmer (Cambodian) language using letters of the Latin alphabet. This is most commonly done with Khmer proper nouns, such as names of people and geographical names, as in a gazetteer. Romanizat ...

Korean language Korean ( South Korean: , ''hangugeo''; North Korean: , ''chosŏnmal'') is the native language for about 80 million people, mostly of Korean descent. It is the official and national language of both North Korea and South Korea (geographic ...

Romanization of Korean Romanization of Korean refers to systems for representing the Korean language in the Latin script. Korea's alphabetic script, called Hangul, has historically been used in conjunction with Hanja (Chinese characters), though such practice has bec ...

Persian language Persian (), also known by its endonym Farsi (, ', ), is a Western Iranian language belonging to the Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian subdivision of the Indo-European languages. Persian is a pluricentric language predominantly spoken and ...

Persian alphabet The Persian alphabet ( fa, الفبای فارسی, Alefbâye Fârsi) is a writing system that is a version of the Arabic script used for the Persian language spoken in Iran ( Western Persian) and Afghanistan (Dari Persian) since the 7th cent ...

***

Cyrillic alphabet , bg, кирилица , mk, кирилица , russian: кириллица , sr, ћирилица, uk, кирилиця , fam1 = Egyptian hieroglyphs , fam2 = Proto-Sinaitic , fam3 = Phoenician , fam4 = G ...

***

Romanization of Persian Romanization of Persian or Latinization of Persian ( fa, لاتین‌نویسی فارسی, Lâtin-Nevisi-ye Fârsi, link=no, ) is the representation of the Persian language ( Iranian Persian, Dari and Tajik) with the Latin script. Several diff ...

*** Persian chat alphabet *

Semitic languages The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They are spoken by more than 330 million people across much of West Asia, the Horn of Africa, and latterly North Africa, Malta, West Africa, Chad, and in large immigra ...

Ugaritic alphabet The Ugaritic writing system is a cuneiform abjad (consonantal alphabet) used from around either 1400 BCE or 1300 BCE for Ugaritic, an extinct Northwest Semitic language, and discovered in Ugarit (modern Ras Al Shamra), Syria, in 1928. It h ...

Hebrew alphabet The Hebrew alphabet ( he, wikt:אלפבית, אָלֶף־בֵּית עִבְרִי, ), known variously by scholars as the Ktav Ashuri, Jewish script, square script and block script, is an abjad script used in the writing of the Hebrew languag ...

***

Romanization of Hebrew The Hebrew language uses the Hebrew alphabet with optional vowel diacritics. The romanization of Hebrew is the use of the Latin alphabet to transliterate Hebrew words. For example, the Hebrew name spelled ("Israel") in the Hebrew alphabet ca ...

** Arabic alphabet ***

Romanization of Arabic The romanization of Arabic is the systematic rendering of written and spoken Arabic in the Latin script. Romanized Arabic is used for various purposes, among them transcription of names and titles, cataloging Arabic language works, language ed ...

***

Arabic chat alphabet The Arabic chat alphabet, ''Arabizi'', Franco-Arabic (), refer to the Romanized alphabets for informal Arabic dialects in which Arabic script is transcribed or encoded into a combination of Latin script and Arabic numerals. These informal chat ...

Slavic languages The Slavic languages, also known as the Slavonic languages, are Indo-European languages spoken primarily by the Slavic peoples and their descendants. They are thought to descend from a proto-language called Proto-Slavic, spoken during the Ear ...

written in the

Cyrillic , bg, кирилица , mk, кирилица , russian: кириллица , sr, ћирилица, uk, кирилиця , fam1 = Egyptian hieroglyphs , fam2 = Proto-Sinaitic , fam3 = Phoenician , fam4 = G ...

Glagolitic alphabet The Glagolitic script (, , ''glagolitsa'') is the oldest known Slavic alphabet. It is generally agreed to have been created in the 9th century by Saint Cyril, a monk from Thessalonica. He and his brother Saint Methodius were sent by the Byzan ...

s **

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 Russian The romanization of the Russian language (the transliteration of Russian text from the Cyrillic script into the Latin script), aside from its primary use for including Russian names and words in text written in a Latin alphabet, is also essential ...

Romanization of Macedonian The romanization of Macedonian is the transliteration of text in Macedonian from the Macedonian Cyrillic alphabet into the Latin alphabet. Romanization can be used for various purposes, such as rendering of proper names in foreign contexts, or for ...

** Romanization of Serbian **

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 ...

Volapuk encoding Informal or ''ad hoc'' romanizations of Cyrillic have been in use since the early days of electronic communications, starting from early e-mail and bulletin board systems.Thai language **

Romanization of Thai There are many systems for the romanization of the Thai language, i.e. representing the language in Latin script. These include systems of transliteration, and transcription. The most seen system in public space is Royal Thai General System of Tra ...

Urdu Language Urdu (;"Urdu"
''Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary''. ur, , link=no, ) is an Indo-Aryan languages, In ...

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 ...

Adopted

* Buckwalter transliteration *

Hans Wehr transliteration The Hans Wehr transliteration system is a system for transliteration of the Arabic alphabet into the Latin alphabet used in the Hans Wehr dictionary (1952; in English 1961). The system was modified somewhat in the English editions. It is printe ...

International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration The International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST) is a transliteration scheme that allows the lossless romanisation of Brahmic family, Indic scripts as employed by Sanskrit and related Indic languages. It is based on a scheme that ...

Scientific transliteration of Cyrillic Scientific transliteration, variously called ''academic'', ''linguistic'', ''international'', or ''scholarly transliteration'', is an international system for transliteration of text from the Cyrillic script to the Latin script (romanization). Thi ...

Transliterations of Manchu There are several systems for transliteration of the Manchu alphabet which is used for writing the Manchu and Xibe languages. These include transliterations in Latin script and in Cyrillic script. Transliteration in Latin script (romanization) T ...

Wylie transliteration Wylie transliteration is a method for transliterating Tibetan script using only the letters available on a typical English-language typewriter. The system is named for the American scholar Turrell V. Wylie, who created the system and published i ...

References

External links

International Components for Unicode transliteration services

– 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 A working group, or working party, is a group of experts working together to achieve specified goals. The groups are domain-specific and focus on discussion or activity around a specific subject area. The term can sometimes refer to an interdis ...

on Romanization Systems.
Library of Congress: Romanization Tables

Localtyping.com
implements google transliteration library and also allows to create To-Do Lists in English and Transliterated Languages.
onlinemarathityping.com
Use Google transliteration for easy typing.
Usage of Transliterations
– condensed description of the definition of transliteration and its usage. * G. Gerych
Transliteration of Cyrillic Alphabets.
Ottawa University, April 1965. 126 pp. – historical overview of the concept of transliteration and its evolution and application {{Authority control