Transliteration - Definitions

Definitions

From an information-theoretical point of view, systematic transliteration is a mapping from one system of writing into another, word by word, or ideally letter by letter. Most transliteration systems are one-to-one, so a reader who knows the system can reconstruct the original spelling.

Transliteration is opposed to transcription, which specifically maps the sounds of one language to the best matching script of another language. Still, most systems of transliteration map the letters of the source script to letters pronounced similarly in the goal script, for some specific pair of source and goal language. If the relations between letters and sounds are similar in both languages, a transliteration may be (almost) the same as a transcription. In practice, there are also some mixed transliteration/transcription systems that transliterate a part of the original script and transcribe the rest.

The transliteration discussed above can be regarded as transliteration in the narrow sense. In a broader sense, the word transliteration may include both transliteration in the narrow sense and transcription.

Transliteration of single words is often an informal non-systematic process; many variants of the same word are often used. For example the Hebrew word מַצָּה is rendered in English, according to the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, as matzo, matzah, matso, motsa, motso, maẓẓo, matza, matzho, matzoh, mazzah, motza, and mozza.