Talk:Transliteration

Organizing This Talk Page

• Greetings.
  • I hope what I've done here proves helpful/useful in our Wikipedia discourse.
    • Please feel free to edit your own sections.
      • My discussion is at the very bottom--I'm not the Ugly American.

Yours truly, Ludvikus 04:01, 9 September 2006 (UTC)

Romanization (Persion)

I have noticed that the Romanization of Persian sometimes reflects not Persian but Arabic pronunciation of vowels (at least in the modern forms of Persian as spoken in Iran). Could someone comment on this?

I'm starting to think that the chunk on Cuneiform transcription should be moved to its own section, like Cuneiform/Transliteration, for example. Any ideas?

Also, I'd like to advance the notion that transliteration refers to an attempt to represent the writing system of a different language, with only secondary importance on representing the sounds of that language.

-Ben Brumfield

Bug

There's some sort of bug that's preventing the space between "mean" and "cloth" from showing up. No idea why.

It looks fine for me in Mozilla 1.2a and IE 5.5 (win2k). What browser, what version, what operating system, and exactly which revision of the page are you looking at? --Brion 08:18 Oct 18, 2002 (UTC)

Transliteration (Chinese) & Alphabet vs. Language

I think the paragraph beginning with "Transliteration has proven to fail miserably in conveying the original pronunciation. One ancient example is..." needs some work. To begin with, the first sentence is hardly NPOV. The examples lists a case of loan words (which has nothing to do with transliteration), which indeed change a lot through time. I do agree that it is hard for a person to correctly pronounce words in a language unknown to him/her, but has this anything to do with transliteration, per se? The problem would still be there if transliteration wasn't involved (e.g. I would upon hearing a tape of spoken Chinese phrases over and over again not be able to produce intelligible reproductions of those phrases).

Further, I think that this article should emphasize that transliteration is mainly used between alphabets, and not languages. Swedish newspapers still list France's president as "Jacques Chirac", not "Skjakk Skjyrakk" (transcribed into Swedish).

--Gabbe 00:36 Jan 3, 2003 (UTC)

Transliteration, Pronounciation, and Experts

My main objection to Transliteration has proven to fail... is: it is no goal of transliteration to convey the original pronunciation in a way transparent to the uninformed reader. Transliterations are specialists' business; and a specialist may be expected to put some effort into learning how to pronounce a transcribed letter (e. g., <ē>) correctly. I have moved the paragraph to transcription and changed its tone a bit. Hope it's better now. (The problem that the uninformed plebs spoils a beautiful expression used by the informed priest is not exclusive to Zen buddhism; see the German Hokuspokus < Latin hoc est corpus.) -- dnjansen

Linguistics (transcription)

I have heavily edited this article and the related page about transcription. The main problem of these words, as I perceive it now, is: There are at least three concepts called with these two words.

1. The general linguistic sense of transcription: Writing down some spoken language (or maybe even more general, copying a text from one source to a written source).
2. The specialised linguistic sense of transcription: Writing the sounds produced in one language using the script of another language.
3. Transliteration in the narrow sense: Mapping the script used to write one language into the script of another language

There are different communities using the words in different oppositions:

• Some oppose Concept 1 with Concepts (2 and 3). They would define transcription as Concept 1 and transliteration as Concept 2 or 3. This was the point of view of a previous version of the two articles.
• Some oppose Concepts 2 and 3 (in a context where Concept 1 is unimportant). They would define Transcription as Concept 2 and Transliteration as Concept 3. The section on transliterating cuneiform languages takes this point of view. For another example of this opposition, read my remarks on the Greek national anthem. Ben Brumfield, in his remark above, seems to think in a similar way.

An example of mixing the uses is found in the external link given in the article, http://www.ifla.org/VII/s13/pubs/isbdg0.htm#0.6: In the beginning of Section 0.6, transcribed is used as Concept 1 in the even more general sense. At the end of this section, transliterated or transcribed are used in the sense of Concepts 3 and 2. This shows that it is not easy to catch the concepts exactly; also I am unsure about the best definition of Concept 1.

Some material previously found in this article applies both to Concepts 2 and 3. I have moved this material to the "Specialised sense" section of transcription and deleted only very little text.

Remarks for further editing.

• Definition of Concept 1 may need more precision. For example, include the following case: Often, linguistic research is based on the analysis of transcriptions of conversations. These transcriptions may have a quite different degree of detail, depending on the research question. So, sometimes it may not be possible to reconstruct the original sounds any more.
• Transcription is used in many modern publications while transliteration was used in older publications. Could somebody give more evidence for this? -- Somebody's answer: I think the author of this comment must have had in mind the difference between Modern Greek and Ancient Greek as rendered into English.

• I know where to put the accents in Old Greek or where to look them up, but as the example to illustrate the difference is New Greek, somebody else has to do that.
• Many people believe that transliterations of the original language should be preferred for places, ... These two paragraphs don't really fit here, but I didn't want to delete them.
• When defining the article Transcription of Russian, the example on the transcription page may be moved there.
• The linguistic part of the transcription article is so large that it hides the genetic part. Maybe the articles should be split for that reason.

-- dnjansen 00:38 Jan 4, 2003 (UTC)

Unified Transliteration

I think that the wikipedia would gain from a unified transliteration (in the narrow sense) of some often used alphabets and syllabaries. As only part of the browsers display Greek, Russian etc. characters correctly (and virtually none are able to display accented Greek or vocalised Hebrew characters), a unified transliteration would enable everybody to get complete and consistent information about words in these foreign scripts. Articles like Greek alphabet, Cyrillic alphabet, Hebrew alphabet, Devanagari, Hiragana could describe a complete transliteration, including variations like accents or vowels signs. Other articles, then, should conform to this transliteration.

The advantage is: Users of the Wikipedia only need to learn a single transliteration per script, instead of one per contributor and script. The disadvantage is: All contributors should be guided to use this transliteration. But as there are many authors and no forceful dictator, it may not be achievable to decide on the transliteration. Is such a project deemed to fail? -- dnjansen 14:41 Jan 5, 2003 (UTC)

1. Unicode addresses this much better. Soon most browsers will have full unicode and script support: many already have this: I can read Arabic, Hebrew and Chinese characters on by browser just fine. Unicode supports (almost) every known script and is a W3C standard; getting a group of people to agree on a "universal" transliteration is unlikely to have much support, and the timescale for getting this together is likely to be far longer than the timescale for Unicode support in > 95% of browsers. For example, the codes Δ Й ק م ๗ ぁ 叶 葉 냻 display on your browser as Δ, Й, ק, م, ๗, ぁ, 叶, 葉 and 냻 which ideally look like the Greek letter "Delta", Cyrillic letter "Short I", the Arabic letter "Meem", the Hebrew letter "Qof", Thai numeral 7, Japanese Hiragana "A", simplified Chinese "Leaf", traditional Chinese "Leaf", and a Korean syllable, respectively. I can see all these characters right now, using Red Hat Linux and the free Mozilla web browser. I agree, though, it is annoying going to my Microsoft Windows 2000 box and being unable to read all the characters.
2. If we use Unicode, and you can get an agreement on a "universal transliteration", we could then auto-generate it from the Unicode, for the 5% of browsers that would still lack Unicode support

-- The Anome 15:07 Jan 5, 2003 (UTC)

Mozilla for Win2000 doesn't let you see them? I'm using Mozilla for winME and can see all of them except the Korean symbol. --KQ

It's the lack of fonts installed by default. I'm just reading http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/ , which is nicely linked from Unicode, to see if I can sort this out. The Anome

Oh yeh, I forgot I went on a font installing spree awhile back because I was sick of the question marks. --KQ

Just a note: I'm using Mac OS X and the Mozilla-based Chimera browser. I can see all of these: Δ, Й, ק, م, ๗, ぁ, 叶, 葉 and 냻 (yay! for Macs!) - Tarquin 16:44 Jan 5, 2003 (UTC) (Mac IE sees them all except the last one )

The Anome is completely right in saying that unicode does address this much better. However, I have found several people asking on Talk pages: My browser doesn't show ..., can you transcribe/transliterate it? What is an acceptable transcription/transliteration of ...? These users probably want their answers earlier than the time of soon most browsers will have full unicode support. For example, there are quite some articles which use SAMPA, the ASCII version of the International Phonetic Alphabet, to accommodate these users -- while unicode does supply all the necessary characters for IPA. So, while unicode is a good solution on the long run, I am looking for a solution for today's users, which is also helpful for "normal" users (who don't know what to do with a line of question marks), heavy-duty users (who have just too many screenfuls of question marks to hassle with them), and users requiring more precision (for example, to distinguish between Hebrew Sin [שׂ &#x5e9;&#x5c2;] and Shin [שׁ &#x5e9;&#x5c1;]). -- dnjansen 20:42 Jan 5, 2003 (UTC)

Transcription (Arabic)

I just picked together a transcription table for arabic (official transcription standard of the ZDMG) in the German wikipedia (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabisches_Alphabet - feel free to copy), however one char, the ayn, is still missing. Does anybody know a Unicode entity which is formed like a small c and is posed above the line? I?ve gone through almost all the unicode tables but could not find one (maybe my browser missed it - Mozilla on MacOS 10.1.5) --Elian

this and this site both deal with that, I think. ʻ --KQ

What about character 0x2bf (found in http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U02B0.pdf )? -- dnjansen

yep, that's it, thanks a lot :-) --Elian

"New Greek" vs. Modern Greek

The article refers to "New Greek". If that means what I think it means, shouldn't it be called "Modern Greek"? Michael Hardy 20:38 Jan 13, 2003 (UTC)

You're right, I mistyped it. dnjansen

perhaps something on the line between tranlation and transliteration and the importance of the latter for revealing errors in the former.-Stevert

Unified System of "Trans{scription,literation}"

This topic seems to have died down. Having a unified system of trans{scription,literation} seems like a very important goal. In my field (modern history), US scholars tend to use the (to me, very unsatisfactory) Library of Congress systems. As Wikipedia is very much an international effort, it seems to me that an international system would be preferable. I would like to suggest the UN systems of romanization. This covers all of the most common scripts (Arabic, Greek, Cyrillic, Chinese, etc.)

Tkinias 03:53, 17 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Transliteration for Foreign Terms

The segment about the desire to use transliterations for foreign terms, which lists München/Munich as an example, does not appear to have anything to do with transliteration. "Munich" isn't just a transcription of "München", it's a whole other word. This is a borrowing issue rather than a transcription issue. -Branddobbe

Accepted/Official English Names for Places and Wikipedia Policy

I had understood the policy to be that where there is a conventional, accepted or official English name for a place, Wikipedia uses it, but may have a redirect page for transcriptions or variations. The issue that bothers me is people's names. Alexey Kosygin for example. "Alexey" or "Alexei"? There is no special standard nor traditional transcription. Should a Wiki-standard transcription apply here? Diderot 09:40, 20 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Transliteration vs. Transcription

Which is preferable, transliteration, or transcription, when translating place-names, or proper names? Transliteration seems better, since letters in one language dont always correspond to letters in the target language. Transcription is finding the correspondin sound for each letter/syllable and THEN making up the word, whereas transliteration trakes the word as a whole, right? Also, is there a system of transliterating Turkish? And how does one compensate for words from centuries ago which may have more modern spellings now? Leave them spelt as they were, or change them to the modern form, for proper names, such as ship names etc. (the same can be asked of Ye Olde Englishe type words too)SpookyMulder 13:53, 21 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I'm Removing a Passage

I'm removing this passage from the Uses of transliteration section.

Many people believe that transliterations of the original language should be preferred for places, people and things over anglicised terms. For example, they might hold that the city commonly Munich in English should instead be called München, as it is in German. There is an increasing tendency in English to do exactly this, although the anglicised forms of most words are still more common, with a few notable exceptions (e.g. Beijing).

Explanations for this may be a desire on the part of English speakers to be "authentic" and "correct", the increasing usage of English by native speakers of non-English languages (who may prefer to use their native language form for a native person or place even in English), and as a reaction to the spread of the English language, which threatens non-English languages — using the native forms of such words may be viewed as a way of compensating for the use of English.

München is not transliterated, but the native form. Conversely Beijing and Peking are both romanized versions of Chinese; neither is strictly "transliterated" since Chinese doesn't use an alphabet.

It would be good to include a short paragraph about the wider use of foreign names in English, related to globalization, telecommunications, and Unicode adoption. —Michael Z. 2005-04-18 15:56 Z

LOL, is the "Zurich dispute" spilling into article space now? Who wrote that? The phrasing is so much like the pov-ones I have learned to detect in cases of real-world nationalist etc. editors that I think this is a really funny example of WP "meta-pov". dab (ᛏ) 16:24, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I just realized the change dates back to Oct 25 :( small wonder nobody I pointed to this article to get an idea of what transliteration means came back the wiser... I guess I never read it all myself before dab (ᛏ) 16:31, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)

You see this occasionally when editors with opposing views justify their arguments in the text, to prevent reverting. Eventually you get a paragraph or whole section with lots of "some people think that..." while "others advocate the view that...", and it's really referring to the WP discussion, and not anything happening in the academic field. —Michael Z. 2005-04-18 20:10 Z

Cyrillic in Wikipedia

Please see the new page at Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Cyrillic), aimed at

1. Documenting the use of Cyrillic and its transliteration in Wikipedia
2. Discussing potential revision of current practices

—Michael Z. 2005-12-9 20:39 Z

New article: scientific transliteration. —Michael Z. 2006-02-07 06:04 Z

Muhammad/Mohammed

Thus, "Muhammad" is in common use now in English and "Mohammed" is less popular

Is this true? I'm an English speaker from the United States and I see "Mohammed" used more frequently. 69.137.220.179 20:20, 27 May 2006 (UTC)

Tranliteration (Russian)

• I'm interested in Transliteration because I'm doing Wikipedia research which involves

Modern Russian History. I write in the AmericanEnglish language and I have absolutely no idea as to which of several romanized forms of a person's or place's name to use.

• I know that the French have something like an academy for this stuff. And even the Chinese had systematized their rules regarding romanization.

• But I'm truly surprised that Wikipedia or Russia--in light of the latter's centralization under the former Soviet system has not succeeded in disseminating more efficiently the rules--if there are any--by which I can decide how to transliterate a Russian Cyrillic name. To bad for the split in the Roman Empire which made St. Cyril give Russia its un-romanized alphabet.

• • Any, HELP!!! I'm not a linguist, except philosophically. My need is a practical one. As I write, romanizing Russian words becomes an issue for me. Here are examples:

    Tsarskoe Selo. How about "Tzarskoe Selo"? "Or even Tsarskye Selo"?
    Sergei Nilus. How about "Sergius"? Or "Sergiei"? Only "Ser" I'm certain of pun.

It should be simple in view of the fact that we have in English the form "Serge"

    Alexandr Pushkin. How come we don't have Alexander Pushkin?

• • • Eventually we will need, at marvelous Wikipedia the following:

    Transliteration (Russian romanized), to distinguish it from
    Transliteration (Russian francofide)--does it exist?  

Yours truly, Ludvikus 04:01, 9 September 2006 (UTC)