GETTING TO GRIPS WITH TRANSLITERATION

Josephine Bacon

The last ‘Editing Matters’ contained extracts from the frustrating correspondence
between T.E. Lawrence (‘Lawrence of Arabia’) and the editor for his book The Seven
Pillars of Wisdom. Unfortunately, the two were on different wavelengths. The editor
could not understand why Lawrence was unable to stick to a consistent spelling of the
same word (Jidda, Jeddah) and Lawrence could not understand why it was important
to do so. As a fluent Arabic speaker, he knew the correct spelling of the name in
Arabic and neither knew or cared about how the names were transliterated into
English.

Transliteration, the transposition of words from one language, often from a foreign
alphabet, to another is often needed for the names of people and places who are in the
news. Unfortunately, it is not, and cannot be, an exact science. This is because many
languages contain sounds that have no exact equivalent in English. Illustrations of the
problem exist even in other languages spoken in the British Isles. For instance, many
English people are unable to pronounce the ‘ch’ in the Scottish word ‘loch’, a
common sound in many other languages. And even though the ‘ch’ sound exists in
Scottish words, it cannot be used for transliteration from other languages into English
because it is the same combination of letters this used for the English ‘ch’ [tch] sound,
as in ‘which’. For this reason, when this sound is transliterated into English from a
non-Latin alphabet it is usually reproduced as ‘kh’ or even an ‘h’ with a dot
underneath. This creates another problem, the use of non-standard letters or symbols
to represent sounds that do not exist in English. In Arabic, three similar sounds are
usually represented as ‘kh’, ‘h’ with a dot underneath and ‘gh’. Not one of them
occurs in English! There is also a creeping fashion for the ‘kh’ sound to be
represented as ‘x’.

Even the use of English letters in transliteration can be problematic for those not
familiar with the foreign language in question. For instance, the letter ‘q’ without a
following ‘u’ is used in English to represent the hard ‘k’ in Arabic, but those who
don’t speak Arabic will not have the faintest idea of how it should be pronounced, and
although ‘Iraq’ is familiar to English-speakers ‘Qalqiliya’ is not.

The international phonetic alphabet makes a good stab at solving the problems of
transliteration but it is known only to academics and linguists and it is not even
capable of reproducing all known sounds. As a translator and editor, I have been
involved in transliteration into English, mainly from Semitic languages and Russian,
for a long time and have come to the conclusion that the only way to deal with the
problem (I cannot say ‘solve’ it because it is frankly insoluble) is to use two separate
transliteration systems, one for scholars and the other for laypeople. In the latter case,
the transliteration should make it easy for a person to identify the word (often a proper
name or place name) and get an approximation of the pronunciation. In the case of
scholarly transliteration, the word can be written in such a way as to indicate to the
reader (who may well speak the foreign language in question or know the
pronunciation of the problematic letters) how the word should be pronounced.
But what about transliteration systems that are imposed on English? Why should we
write, or say, ‘Beijing’ when we used to say ‘Peking’? For some reason, English
publications have accepted the antiquated Chinese transliteration system for English
which in many cases does not even remotely approximate the actual Chinese sound.
There is actually no justification for this, it is cultural imperialism by the Chinese.
The French call Dover ‘Douvres’ shall we force them to call it Dover and in that case
will we have to write ‘Dunquerque’ instead of ‘Dunkirk’?

Many languages that do not use Latin characters – and even some that do – use
sounds that have no equivalent in English and which are virtually impossible to
reproduce accurately. This is the reason why for most languages more than one
transliteration system can be found in written matter. For instance, the holy book once
referred to as the Koran is now usually written as Q’uran, as being closer to the
authentic pronunciation and for some reason more acceptable to Moslems, or
Muslims as they now like to style themselves.

My own preference is for transliteration in non-scholarly works to be as simple as

possible, resorting to a pronunciation glossary in the front or back only where
absolutely necessary. Scholarly works operate to a different standard, but even here
simplification and ease of understanding should be paramount.

About the author: Josephine Bacon is an editor and translator and has translated
about 100 books. She has also written 15 books on subjects ranging from Jewish
history to fungi. Although she only translates from French and Hebrew, she has a fair
knowledge of six other languages, including Arabic and Russian, and a smattering of
Gree and Turkish, having lived in Cyprus for two years where she was working as a
translator for the U.S. government. In 1968, she created the Arabic transliteration
system for the Encyclopedia Judaica.