![]() The longest-running of which (currently in use albeit with some recent updates) is the 1971 Modified Beirut System. The transliteration of Arabic is so complex that people have been working on an international transliteration system for decades. For instance, Rigel – the brightest star in the Orion constellation – is “رجل الجبّار” in Arabic, which can be transliterated into “Rijl ul-Jabbār”. The names we use for stars largely derive from Arabic. Let’s look at a few examples that demonstrate just how difficult it can be to correctly transliterate words and phrases. Transliteration is the bread and butter of translators and cultural mediators. Transliteration is essential if you want to convey a key element of a certain “culture” in a foreign language, such as proper nouns, geographical names, and other nouns that cannot be easily translated. Knowledge of modern transliteration rules forms the basis of professional, high-quality translation services, such as those offered by Eurotrad. Transliteration is not to be confused with transcription, which is used to facilitate the correct pronunciation of foreign words by replacing letters with those that best replicate the sound in the target language. On a technical level, transliteration consists in replacing the graphemes of one alphabet with corresponding graphemes in another alphabet, regardless of their pronunciation in a word or group of words. Transliteration is about fully understanding the fundamental mechanisms of interlingual communication. Advertisements, commercials, mottos, and slogans, which often use figurative language (metaphors, similes, analogies or colloquialisms) will typically require transcreation – a process that preserves everything that is conveyed by the written or spoken word that can’t be translated word for word into the target language without losing or changing its meaning or intent.The meaning of the word “transliteration” It is a term used mainly by marketing and advertising experts and professionals to describe the process of adopting a message from one language to another language while maintaining its intent, style, tone, and context - “localizing” the message to the country where it is going to be used. Transcreation is a deeper level of translation. Transliteration would also make it possible to write “good morning” in English using Japanese characters so a Japanese speaker could pronounce “good morning” in English just by reading the Japanese characters. – all these languages may require transliteration, for instance, for an English speaker who cannot read foreign characters or alphabets.įor example, American executives probably can’t read hiragana, one of Japan’s written forms, a professional translator would use transliteration to spell, Ohayōgozaimasu, so it’s legible to them. Transliteration is used, for example, for a language that uses characters other than Roman characters (the ones we use to write in English). Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, etc. Transliteration has more to do with sound than meaning. The translator needs to come up with an equally compelling expression (most likely a Spanish idiom) to capture that same energy or meaning. ![]() In this case, “you are dead meat” means “you are a dead man”. Let’s take an easy example: if you come across a part of a story where a character says “you are dead meat…” – that is not going to translate well into Spanish if you do a pure word-for-word substitution. ![]() Translation should not be a simple word-for-word replacement, based only on word meaning or definition.Ī comprehensive translation considers multiple factors, including meaning, grammar, contextual meaning, and cultural sensitivities. The process of translation transfers the direct meaning and feeling (or essence) of the written word from one language to another. It is important to understand a little bit more about what each one is, and how it will – or could – come to play in your future translation projects, your conversations and strategic meetings with your translation team. As a client you may hear one or more of these three words – translation, transliteration, and transcreation. ![]() Professional translation’s job is to transfer intent, meaning, and culture from a document’s source language to the target language. ![]()
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