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Regional

Transliteration

Also known as: romanisation · Arabic transliteration

Definition

Transliteration is writing the sounds of words from one script in another script, such as an Arabic name in Latin letters or an English brand name in Arabic letters. It is not translation, and because no one spelling is universal, a single name can have many.

Hussain, Hussein and Husain are one name, and so are Abdullah, Abdulla and Abdallah. Arabic letters with no Latin twin are rendered differently by different writers: the letter qaf appears as q, k or g, so one surname can turn up under three spellings. To a person these are obviously the same. To a search engine, a directory or a database, each is a separate string.

It runs in the other direction too. English place and brand names are written in Arabic letters by sound, and an Arabic name can be handled in more than one way: transliterated, translated, or given a separate Arabic name. Which form customers type is something to check in Google's autocomplete, not to assume.

For a business the discipline is a pair: one agreed Latin form and one agreed Arabic form, held in a master record and used on the website, profiles, listings and invoices. Mention a common alternative once in natural text, such as 'also written Al-Noor', and list alternate names in the site's structured data. Have an Arabic writer produce the Arabic form, since a translation tool renders meaning when the brand needs sound.

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