With the vowel signs, Bin Ladin is written as follows: بِن لاَدِن As is well known, Arabic is normally written without vowel signs and thus there is no direct way to know the vowels associated with each consonant. Using our example of Bin Ladin, in Arabic this is actually pronounced, and the transcription Bin Ladin reflects this rather accurately, whereas such variants as Bin Laden and Ben Laden do not. This can be a phonetic transcription, which uses a phonetic alphabet such as IPA to represent the actual speech sounds of the source language (including allophones), or a phonemic transcription, which uses scientific or conventional orthography to represents the phonemes of the source language (ignoring allophones), such as in the romanization of Arabic or Japanese. Transcription is the representation of the source script of a language in the target script in a manner that reflects the pronunciation of the original, often ignoring graphemic (character-to-character) correspondence. It merely maps source script graphemes to target graphemes and is thus graphemic in nature. The word بن is actually pronounced bin, but transliteration does not attempt to represent this. In good transliteration systems, there is always full one-to-one correspondence to ensure round-trip conversion. Thus in the table above b corresponds to the letter ba ( ب) and n to the letter nun ( ن). The essence of transliteration is that each letter (more precisely, each grapheme) is represented by one character or sometimes multiple characters ( digraphs or trigraphs). Thus in actual Arabic script Bin Ladin is written: بن لادن In Arabic, the independent shapes of some letters ( graphemes) undergo form transformations ( allographs) depending on their position in the word (see the charts at the end of this report). In Arabic this is written, from right to left, using the six letters shown at right. The aim of transliteration is to represent the script of a source language by using the letters or symbols of another script, usually in accordance with the orthographical conventions of the target language. In this report, transliteration is used in the strict sense of orthographical transliteration. grammatologists, these terms are not standardized. Note that though the terminology used here is "theoretically correct," and is used by linguists, esp. Sometimes, the term transliteration or transcription is used as a generic term for all these processes, which is quite misleading since it does not distinguish orthographical transliteration, (one-to-one graphemic mapping) from transcription (essentially one-to-many phonemic mapping). There is much confusion surrounding the terminology related to the general process of representing the characters of one script in those of another (such as writing Japanese or Arabic in the Roman alphabet), which includes various procedures such as transliteration, transcription, romanization, transcribing, and technography. These are beyond the scope of this brief report, and are mostly covered in papers found on our Articles/papers page. From an information processing point of view there are many complex issues, such as morphological analysis, incompatible character sets, text retrieval, a plethora of input methods, and many others. Some factors contributing to this include the large number of characters used in Japanese and Chinese and their complex forms, the lack of vowels in Arabic and other Semitic scripts (known as abjads), and the presence of a large number of orthographic variants. The orthographic complexity of some of the major languages using non-Roman scripts, such as Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic, poses formidable challenges to information processing applications. A related technology, called transcripting (Chinese-to-Chinese conversion), is described in detail in our paper The Pitfalls and Complexities of Chinese to Chinese Conversion. This report provides a brief overview of some linguistic issues related to two text conversion procedures known as transliteration and transcription. Transliteration and Transcription Technology Introduction
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