In a message dated 2001-07-03 21:06:50 Pacific Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
writes:
> So if I was trying to write my fake name in Polish, or for a Pole to read,
I
> would write it as "Tendou Rjuud{U+017E}i"?
>
> That would be transliteration, right?
Maybe not. This is the part I got wrong several weeks ago when we had this
discussion, and I hope my understanding is better now.
Transliteration is about building a reversible mapping between the original
(in this case, Japanese) sounds and a set of (in this case, Latin)
characters, with the focus on reversibility rather than legibility. You
might even use numbers or other symbols to ensure that the transliterated
version can be mapped unambiguously back to Japanese. The reader might have
to go through a learning curve to equate your symbols with the desired sounds.
Transcription is about optimizing the Latin-script version for, say, a
Polish-language reader. A transcription has not only a target script but
also a target language, and it might be different for each of Polish, German,
French, English, etc. The goal is enabling the Polish reader to pronounce
the Japanese text with a minimal learning curve.
A classic example of Russian-to-X transcription (where X is some Latin-script
language) is a well-known name like Khrushchev or Gorbachev. Here the
spellings I have used are those that would likely lead an English speaker to
pronounce the names reasonably correctly. A transcription intended for
German speakers might be "Khruschtschow." None of these would be a proper
transliteration, because they are not completely reversible (the 'shch' and
'schtsch' combinations could be U+0449 or (U+0448 plus U+0447).
Unfortunately, the terms "transcription" and "transliteration" are commonly
mixed up by non-experts, causing much confusion.
Please, somebody let me know if this is still not right.
-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
