TRANSLITERATION:

ORIGIN:

The name originates from the word “transliterate,” meaning to convert from one script to another
(e.g., transliteration of a word from the Greek to the Latin alphabet). The concept originated in Alan
Liu’s Transliteracies Project initiated at the University of California in 2005 as an investigation of
practices of online reading. 

DEFINITION:

Transliteration involves changing the script used to write words in one language to the script of
another; taking the letters or characters from a word and changing them into the equivalent characters
in another language. This process is concerned with the spelling and not the sound.

Purpose of Transliteration:

The primary aim of transliteration is to provide an alternate means of reading text using a different
script. Transliteration is intended to broadly preserve the sounds of the original script, but the focus is
not on providing an accurate phonemic representation as it is in the case of transcription.

Benefits of transliteration:

Transliteration helps people pronounce words and names in foreign languages. It changes the letters
from the word's original alphabet to similar-sounding letters in a different one.

Two types of transliteration:

Forward transliteration and backward transliteration. Forward Transliteration is the transliteration of

a foreign name (in the case of our system, Arabic) into English. Typically, there are several acceptable
transliteration candidates. For example, the Arabic name “‫ ”محمد‬might correctly be transliterated into
Mohamed, Mohammed, Mohammad, etc.

Back transliteration, also called reverse translation, is the process of re-translating content from the
target language back to its source language in literal terms.

For example: Hola (spanish) Hello (English)

Machine Transliteration:

Machine translation is the process of using artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically translate content
from one language (the source) to another (the target) without any human input. There are many factors
contribute to the difficulty of machine translation, including words with multiple meanings, sentences
with multiple grammatical structures, uncertainty about what a pronoun refers to, and other problems
of grammar.

Conclusion:

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. But if you
want to know what it means, you need translation services.