Is transliteration a word

Last Update: Jan 03, 2023

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Asked by: Jerel Schiller

Score: 4.4/5
(4 votes)

Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one script to another that involves swapping letters in predictable ways, such as Greek ⟨α⟩ → ⟨a⟩, Cyrillic ⟨д⟩ → ⟨d⟩, Greek ⟨χ⟩ → the digraph ⟨ch⟩, Armenian ⟨ն⟩ → ⟨n⟩ or Latin ⟨æ⟩ → ⟨ae⟩.

What is transliteration example?

Transliteration is the process of transferring a word from the alphabet of one language to another. … It changes the letters from the word’s original alphabet to similar-sounding letters in a different one. In Hebrew, the Jewish winter holiday is חנוכה. Its English transliteration is Hanukkah or Chanukah.

What is the difference between transliteration and translation?

However, there are some significant distinctions. Translation, put in simple terms, gives you the meaning of a word that’s written in another language. A transliteration doesn’t tell you the meaning of the word, but it gives you an idea of how the word is pronounced in a foreign language.

What do we mean by transliteration?

: to represent or spell in the characters of another alphabet.

Why is transliteration used?

Transliteration is utilized when a word or phrase must be conveyed in a language with a different writing system. … When those characters are transliterated, they approximate the Chinese word’s pronunciation using Latin letters. If you can’t read or speak Chinese, you still won’t understand the transliterated language.

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

«Transliterate» redirects here. For the concept of being literate in all media, see Transliteracy. For the Wikipedia template, see Template:Transliteration.

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

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 Greek above example, ⟨λλ⟩ is transliterated ⟨ll⟩ though it is pronounced [l], ⟨Δ⟩ is transliterated ⟨D⟩ though pronounced [ð], and ⟨η⟩ is transliterated ⟨ē⟩, though it is pronounced [i] (exactly like ⟨ι⟩) and is not long.

Transcription, conversely, seeks to capture sound rather than spelling; «Ελληνική Δημοκρατία» corresponds to [elinicí ðimokratía]^[2] in the International Phonetic Alphabet. While differentiation is lost in the case of [i], note how the letter shape ⟨κ⟩ becomes either [c] or [k] depending on the vowel that follows it.

Angle brackets ⟨ ⟩ 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[edit]

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. 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[edit]

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,^[3] and from transliteration from 1982 on, but it is nonetheless frequently encountered.

Challenges[edit]

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.^[4] 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.

Adopted[edit]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

External links[edit]

• International Components for Unicode transliteration services ICU User Guide: Transforms
• Transliteration history Archived 2007-12-13 at the Wayback Machine – 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
• 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

There are two ways of rendering proper names in
translation: transcription and transliteration.

Transcription —
The representation of the sound of the words in a language using
another alphabet or set of symbols created for that purpose.
Transcription is not concerned with representing characters: it
strives to give a phonetically (or phonologically) accurate
representation of the word. This may differ, depending on the
language or set of symbols into which the word is being transcribed.
Because transcription attempts to recreate the meaning-bearing sounds
of the original using the alphabet(s) and spelling conventions of the
language into which it is transcribed, multiple spellings of the same
word are possible for a single language, and dozens may be
encountered if searching across languages.

Transcription is now universally accepted: Mary
– Мэри. Phonetic peculiarities,
however, sometimes interfere and modify this principle by causing
certain departures, e.g. the name of the well-known novelist Iris
Murdoch is rendered with the inserted letter (and sound) “p” –
Айрис Мэрдок.

Transliteration
or representing a SL word by means of the more or less corresponding
TL characters, that is, in a graphic way, is no longer regarded as an
acceptable method of rendering proper names in
translation.Transliteration is not concerned with representing the
phonetics of the original: it only strives to accurately represent
the characters.

But tradition has preserved it in some cases and
therefore this method still survives, e.g. Lincoln
is rendered as Линкольн and
Wellington
as Веллингтон. O’Henry
– О’Генри.

Hollywood — Голливуд

Beatles – Битлз

24. Occasional lacuna and the problem of translation

Non-equivalents are SL words which have no corresponding lexical
units in the TL vocabulary.

The absence of equivalents may be explained both
by extralinguistic and linguistic reasons. Accordingly,
non-equivalents may be divided into two groups. The first group
consists of words denoting referents unknown in the target language –
things, objects, notions, features of national life, customs, habits,
etc. the words of this group bear a distinctly national character and
are tied up with the history of the people speaking that language,
the growth of its culture, its way of life and traditions. The words
belonging to this group cover a wide range of denotation, e.g.
speaker, parliament, public school,
landslide, coroner, teach-in, drive-in, know-how, striptease, brain
drain, backbencher, grill-room, as well
as titles of politeness, etc.

The second group embraces words which for some
linguistic reason have no equivalents in the target language, the
so-called linguistic lacuna,
e.g. privacy, involvement, glimpse,
conservationist, environmentalist, oralist, readership, riser,
bedder, vote-getter, statehood, etc.

There are three ways of rendering non-equivalents in translation.

1. By Borrowings

The borrowed words may be either transliterated or
transcribed, e.g. ale –эль,
roastbeef – ростбиф, sweater – свитер
(transliterated borrowings). Parliament
– парламент, striptease – стриптиз, speaker –
спикер, know-how – ноу-хау,
establishment – истэблишмент
(transcribed borrowings).

2. By translation loans

House of Commons – Палата
Общин, backbencher –
заднескамеечник,
brain trust – мозговой трест.

3. By Descriptive or Interpreting
Translation

Landslide – победа на
выборах с огромным перевесом голосов;

a stringer (америк.) – частично занятый
корреспондент, труд которого оплачивается
из расчета количества слов;

a conservationist
(environmentalist) –
человек, озабоченный загрязнением или
уничтожением окружающей среды.

25. Antonymic translation

Antonymic
translation is
employed for the sake of achieving
faithfulness in conveying content or the necessary expressiveness of
sense
units. It represents a way of rendering when an affirmative in
structure
language unit (word, word-combination or sentence) is conveyed
via a negative in sense or structure but identical in content
language
unit, or vice versa: a negative in sense or structure sense unit
is translated via an affirmative sense unit. E.g. to have
quite a few friends
— мати
багато
(немало) друзів; mind your own business — не
втручайся не в свої справи; take
it easy — не
хвилюйся; not
infrequently — часто; я
не нездужую
нівроку — І
feel perfectly well.

The antonymic device is employed in the following cases:

1. when
in the target language there is no direct equivalent for the
sense unit of the source language. For example, the noun
«inferiority»
and the adjective «inferior» (like the verb phrase «to be
inferior») have no single-word
equivalents in Ukrainian. So their lexical meaning
can be conveyed either in a descriptive way or with the help of
their antonyms «superiority», «superior»: The
defeat of the Notts in
last season’s cup semi-finals was certainly the result of their
physical and
tactical inferiority… Поразка
клубу «Ноттінгем Форест»
у торішньому півфінальному матчі на
кубок країни була наслідком
переваги їхніх
супротивників у фізичній і тактичній
підготовці.

The meaning
of some English word-groups can also be conveyed
in Ukrainian antonymically only: Baines
was sitting in his
shirt-sleeves. Бейнз сидів
без піджака. Do you mind
this? Ви
не заперечуєте?

2.
When
the sense unit of the source language has two negations
of its own which create an affirmation: In
those clothes she
was by no means non-elegant. У
цьому вбранні вона
була досить елеґантна.

3. In order to achieve the necessary
expressiveness in narration:
I
don’t think
it will hurt you. Думаю,
вам воно не зашкодить. A
shell fell
close. Неподалік
вибухнув снаряд.

4. In order to avoid the use of the same or
identical structures close to each other in a text (stylistic aim and
means): She was a woman of character.
Вона
була жінкою не
без характеру.
Most
of the staff is
not away.
Більшість
співробітників ще на
роботі.
Savina said
nothing.
Савіна
промовчала.

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Asked by: Annamarie Kub

Score: 4.6/5
(72 votes)

English Language Learners Definition of transliterate

: to write words or letters in the characters of another alphabet.

What is transliteration with example?

Transliteration is the process of transferring a word from the alphabet of one language to another. … It changes the letters from the word’s original alphabet to similar-sounding letters in a different one. In Hebrew, the Jewish winter holiday is חנוכה. Its English transliteration is Hanukkah or Chanukah.

What is the difference between a translation and transliteration?

A: A translation tells you the meaning of words in another language. A transliteration doesn’t tell you the meaning of the words, but it helps you pronounce them. Transliteration changes the letters from one alphabet or language into the corresponding, similar-sounding characters of another alphabet.

How does transliteration work?

Transliteration simply converts a text from one script to another. It is not concerned about faithfully representing the sounds of the original; rather, it focusses on representing the characters with as much accuracy and unambiguity as possible.

Why is transliteration used?

Transliteration focuses more on pronunciation than meaning, which is especially useful when discussing foreign people, places, and cultures. Therefore, if you need to read text in another language, and are more interested in pronouncing it than understanding it, you need transliteration.

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